Bomb: The Race to Build–and Steal–the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon, by Steve Sheinkin, is part spy thriller, part war story, part character study, and part Scientific American. It’s about scientific discovery, heroism, ingenuity, responsibility, secrecy, treason, and irrevocable decisions. Most sobering of all, it is completely true and it is still relevant today.
The bomb in question is the atomic bomb. Whoever wields it controls the outcome of both World War II and the post-atomic future. Germany has the advantage from the start; fission, the concept behind unleashing the atom’s power, was discovered in Berlin in 1938, and after Germany’s invasion of most of Europe, the Nazis controlled production of crucial bomb making materials such as uranium and heavy water. US strategy involved secretly inviting the world’s best scientists to the remote location of Los Alamos, where they worked under the leadership of theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union is so far behind both countries in their nuclear research that it would be faster to develop a bomb through espionage. And that’s precisely what the KGB does.