8vo. Photographic plates. Original publisher’s salmon cloth lettered in burgundy on spine (very slight wear to extremities); original printed yellow and black dust jacket (price-clipped, slight wear at ends of spine panel, upper front panel creased, slight soiling). Provenance: Unidentified signature front pastedown.

 

FIRST EDITION, trade issue, SIGNED BY EDWARD TELLER, “THE FATHER OF THE HYDROGEN BOMB.” Teller emigrated to the United States from Hungary in 1935; in 1941, he joined Fermi’s team that produced the first nuclear chain reaction.  He joined with Oppenheimer at the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1943 as group leader in the Theoretical Physics Division.  

 

Published on August 12, 1945 (only six days after Hiroshima), Smyth’s Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, is a "remarkably full and candid account of the development work carried out between 1940 and 1945 by the American-directed but internationally recruited team of physicists, under the code name of 'Manhattan District', which culminated in the production of the first atomic bomb" (PMM).  The first trade edition was preceded by top-secret mimeographed versions of the typescript, and a lithoprint version produced by the Pentagon for distribution to the press. PMM 422e; Princeton University Library Chronicle Vol. 37, No. 3, pp.204-18; see Norman 1962.