The Fire and the Dawn

In the space of six years, under the pressure of the most terrible war in history, a handful of refugee physicists and an army of secret workers turned an abstract discovery about the nucleus of the atom into a weapon that could destroy a city in an instant — and changed the terms of human existence forever.

This is the whole sweep of the Manhattan Project in a single volume: the discovery of fission in a Berlin laboratory on the eve of war; the refugees who warned a reluctant America that Hitler might build the bomb first; the brilliant, abrasive general and the haunted physicist who led the effort; the secret cities conjured from empty land, where uranium was sorted atom by atom and a new element was bred in the world's first reactors; the desperate invention of implosion; the blinding dawn at Trinity; and the two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the weapon was first used against human beings.

Vivid, clear, and unflinching, this is a popular history that explains the science so anyone can follow it, tells the human story of the makers and the victims, and refuses the easy certainties of both those who insist the bomb was a pure mercy and those who insist it was a pure crime. It carries the story past 1945 — into the espionage that broke the American monopoly, the hydrogen bomb, the tragedy of Oppenheimer, and the nuclear age we still inhabit. It is the story of the fire we lit in the desert, and have never been able to put out.