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eds., Alamogordo plus Twenty-Five Years: The Impact of Atomic Energy on Science, Technology, and World Politics (New York: Viking, 1970). Memoirs by political or military figures involved in the Manhattan Project and postwar atomic issues include Leslie R. Groves, Now it Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962); Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, i. Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1955), and ii. Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1956); William D. Leahy, I Was There: The Personal Story of the Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, Based on his Notes and Diaries Made at the Time (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950); Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947); and Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969).

Several books on the atomic bomb generally have greatly informed and enriched this study. Richard Rhodes has been criticized by some historians for not fully consulting the documentary record, but, if Rhodes’s books are perhaps not definitive concerning atomic-bomb decisionmaking, they are nevertheless clear on the physics of the bomb, compelling in their sweep and scope, and superb sources of information about the men and women who imagined and built and used the bombs, and I have relied on them heavily: see his The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986) and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). Other fine general studies of the bomb are Fletcher Knebel and Charles W Bailey II, No High Ground (New York: Harper and Row, 1960); Peter Wyden, Day One: Before Hiroshima and After (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984); Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists, trans. James Cleugh (San Diego: Harcourt, 1958); Ronald W Clark, The Greatest Power on Earth: The International Race for Nuclear Supremacy (New York: Harper and Row, 1980); and Gerard J. DeGroot, The Bomb: A History of Hell on Earth (London: Pimlico, 2005). All five of these books are written with exceptional flair and vividness, and are likely to captivate general readers.

CHAPTER ONE. THE WORLD’S ATOM

On the quest to understand the structure of the atom, see, in addition to Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, Fermi, Atoms in the Family, Serber, The Los Alamos Primer and Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns, J. Bronowski, ‘The ABC of the Atom’, in Hiroshima Plus 20; George Gamow, Atomic Energy in Cosmic and Human Life: Fifty Years of Radioactivity (New York: Macmillan, 1946); Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939—1945 (New York: St Martin’s, 1964); and Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995 [1971]). The use of poison gas on the battlefield during the First World War is covered by participant observers in

Victor Lefebure, The Riddle of the Rhine: Chemical Strategy in Peace and War (New York: Chemical Foundation, 1923); Amos A. Fries and Clarence J. West, Chemical Warfare (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1921); and Hahn, My Life. Scholarly works on gas include L. F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Edward M. Spiers, Chemical Warfare (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986). On the role played by the state in the pursuit of science, see various essays in Etel Solingen, ed., Scientists and the State: Domestic Structures and the International Context (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). The evolution of Soviet nuclear science is covered brilliantly in David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939—1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); for the story in the United States, see, along with Kevles, The Physicists, Robert Gilpin, American Scientists and Nuclear Weapons Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962).