NONFICTION - Nov. 26, 1995

PICTURING THE BOMB: Photographs From the Secret World of the Manhattan Project, by Rachel Fermi and Esther Samra (Harry N. Abrams: $39.95; 232 pp.). Because we know the way the story turned out, these photographs, almost all taken before the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have a markedly ominous air about them. Sometimes the most innocent pictures, like bingo night at Hanford, Wash., or a Girl Scout troop outside Oak Ridge, Tenn. (both sites of factories producing refined uranium and plutonium for the bombs), have the most sinister air. Many of the eeriest pictures, like the arrival of the plutonium core at Trinity, the site of the first nuclear explosion, were taken in the environs of Los Alamos, N.M., which Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, described as “the largest collection of crackpots ever seen.” Photographer Fermi, the granddaughter of physicist Enrico Fermi, and writer-photographer Samra have put together a concise and cohesive look at how the bomb was conceived and built in an air of such secrecy that rumors were circulated that Los Alamos was either a maternity home for WACS or that it manufactured submarine windshield wipers. Most of the pictures are in somber black and white, but the color ones are especially affecting, like the only color photograph taken of the Trinity explosion, which produced, for an instant, a light brighter than any ever seen on Earth before.