The Impossible Story of the Bomb

Imagine a meadow, unsullied by floodlights or asphalt or creosote or diesel fuel; here, turkeys gobble, squirrels dart, songbirds sing. High in the sky, a lone hawk circles. This is the scene Richard Rhodes sets in the foreword to his totemic 1986 book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, the definitive, gripping account of the bomb’s genesis. For a time, Rhodes lived on such a meadow, spread across 4 acres in the Connecticut countryside. “Except for the hawk,” he writes, “every one of those animals constantly and fearfully watched over its shoulder lest it be caught, torn, and eaten alive. From the animals’ point of view, my edenic four acres were a war zone.”