Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon

Army general Leslie Groves, “an engineer by training” (47), oversaw the Manhattan Project’s development and construction of the first atomic bombs. As the soldier who managed the wartime construction of The Pentagon—the US War Department’s then-new headquarters and the largest office building in the world—Groves was highly qualified to get large industrial jobs done.

Groves steadfastly supported Robert Oppenheimer, the genius physicist who directed the scientific effort that produced the first atomic weapons. Groves’s faith in Oppenheimer, despite widespread suspicions about the scientist’s loyalty, paid off spectacularly when the atomic bombs became a reality that changed the face of World War II. In Sheinkin’s account, Groves’s relentless efforts to cajole, badger, and otherwise inspire his thousands of Manhattan Project workers are critical to the success of one of the most complex and daunting scientific-industrial projects ever undertaken.

Eager to please and grateful for the job he got from Tom Black, young chemist Harry Gold agreed to help Black, a Communist, smuggle industrial secrets to the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Gold soon discovered that the Soviets weren’t who he thought they were and tried to back out, but his Russian spymasters threatened him, and he continued to serve them. His work ferrying information from spy Klaus Fuchs made Gold a key player in the Soviet theft of US nuclear secrets. His story is a reminder that The Race to Build a Bomb was threatened at all times by dangers and betrayals from otherwise law-abiding US citizens.

German physicist and Communist Klaus Fuchs, beaten nearly to death by Nazi stormtroopers during the 1930s, escaped to England and became involved in the British-American atomic bomb program. As a spy for the Soviets, however, Fuchs funneled critical information about atomic weapons to Russia. When his research team moved to Los Alamos, Fuchs continued to send details about the bomb to Russia, using Harry Gold as a go-between.

After the war, Fuchs’s activities were uncovered and Britain sentenced him to 14 years for spying. Had his intelligence not gone to a wartime ally but, for example, to Nazi Germany, Fuchs would have been executed. Fuchs’s contributions to the Soviet weapons program arguably were among the most significant betrayals during the Allied war effort, highlighting the theme of Trust and Suspicion in Wartime.

At 19, Hall was very young for a Harvard graduate, but he was nevertheless admitted into the Manhattan Project, where he promptly spied on the program for Russia. Hall’s information corroborated that coming from Klaus Fuchs; this helped the Soviets trust the data, speeding their progress toward completing their own atomic weapon. Though known by the FBI to be an important spy for Russia, Hall was never indicted, partly because the agency didn’t have enough evidence against him to hold up in court, and partly because Hall, unlike Fuchs and Gold, never admitted to his complicity. His is a lesson in the confusion of wartime: Sometimes the guilty go free, while the innocent, like Oppenheimer, are punished.

Norwegian anti-Nazi resistance fighter Knut Haukelid helped sabotage the German heavy-water procurement project at the Vemork power plant near Rjukan, Norway. He later planted explosives on the ferry transporting the heavy water containers headed for Germany, which sunk the boat along with Nazi hopes for a nuclear weapon. Sheinkin frames Haukelid as a hero during the darkest hours of World War II; he gives courage to the Allied scientists who are racing to construct an atom bomb before Hitler’s researchers build one of their own.

Colonel Paul Tibbets was one of the best bomber pilots in the US Army Air Force and a test pilot for the nation’s newest bomber, the B-29, when he got the assignment to fly the new plane over Japan. There, he would drop an atomic bomb on a city. He carefully trained a hand-picked crew that performed its mission perfectly. The bomb they deployed, a gun-assembly uranium device called “Little Boy,” destroyed Hiroshima in one blast. Tibbets’s crew recorded the results, which provided the first evidence of the effects of nuclear weapons on cities. Tibbets became one of the public faces of the atomic bomb project.

Heisenberg was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who, in the 1920s, helped establish the theory of quantum mechanics and later led the German effort to develop an atomic bomb. As such, he proved too important for Allied forces to ignore. The OSS sent Moe Berg to a Swiss lecture given by Heisenberg, where the spy had orders to shoot the physicist if he sensed that the Germans had made great progress in their bomb-making efforts. Heisenberg, though a German patriot, was fatalistic about the war, so his life was spared.

When Heisenberg was captured at the end of the war, the Allies found that his atomic project was far behind the US’s, suffering for lack of critical resources. In later decades, Heisenberg oversaw developments in nuclear power for West Germany and was a longtime director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics. In Bomb, Heisenberg is a human prize in the race to build an atomic bomb, first between the Allies and Germany, and later between the US and Russia.

An ex-baseball pro trained in law and language, Moe Berg was the perfect choice to spy on German bomb-design leader Werner Heisenberg. He got a crash course in atomic physics and then shadowed Heisenberg in Switzerland. At a lecture given by the scientist, and later at a university party nearby, Berg listened for signs that the German bomb program was successful; if so, he was to shoot Heisenberg on the spot. The physicist seemed to feel the war already is lost, and he gave no clue that his team had made any significant advances in bomb technology. Moe Berg’s encounter with Heisenberg was one of the most unusual adventures of the war and the atomic-bomb effort, and it is part of what gives Bomb its spy-thriller feel.

Physicist Lise Meitner, a rare woman in a field dominated by men during the early 1900s, made so many discoveries in atomic physics that she was nominated 19 times for a Nobel Prize. Her greatest work coincided with Hitler’s rise to power and persecution of Jews—including Meitner, who escaped to Sweden. Her colleague Otto Hahn discovered that uranium can split apart when bombarded with neutrons; Meitner reasoned out the principle of atomic fission and its implications for nuclear power and weapons. She never won the Nobel Prize, so scientists redressed the oversight by naming an atomic element, meitnerium, in her honor.

Otto Hahn was a German scientist who, with scientific partner Lise Meitner, made several important discoveries in the field of radioactivity. In 1938, he found that uranium atoms, when exposed to radiation from other atoms, can split apart and release energy. This led to the invention of atomic power and nuclear weapons. Hahn’s discovery launched the race for the atomic bomb; that he was a German scientist during the Nazi era reminded other nations that Hitler’s researchers would try to build such a superweapon.

When Hahn learned of the devastation caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, he briefly considered suicide for his role in the A-bomb’s history. Hahn is an example of the grueling torment that some scientists suffered as they weighed the costs and benefits of building a nuclear weapon.

A resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, who landed a job as secretary to Oppenheimer, Dorothy McKibben is an everywoman figure in a book full of scientific geniuses. As Sheinkin depicts her, she has the wise comportment of an outsider; she respects the scientists she works for but can see past their elite expertise to their all-too-human frailties. She manages their comings and goings with a deft touch and serves as a motherly presence to the frantic, anxious researchers.