PEGASUS BOOKS NEW YORK For Jini, My soulmate CONTENTS List of illustrations Preface Prologue: Letter from Berlin PART I: MOBILISATION Chapter 1 The Uranverein Chapter 2 Element 94 Chapter 3 Critical Mass Chapter 4 A Visit to Copenhagen Chapter 5 Tube Alloys PART II: WEAPON Chapter 6 A Modest Request Chapter 7 The Italian Navigator Chapter 8 Los Alamos Ranch School Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Escape from Copenhagen PART III: WAR Chapter 11 Uncle Nick Chapter 12 Mortal Crimes Chapter 13 Alsos and AZUSA Chapter 14 The Final Push Chapter 15 Trinity Chapter 16 Hypocentre Chapter 17 Operation Epsilon PART IV: PROLIFERATION Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Iron Curtain Chapter 20 Crossroads Chapter 21 Arzamas-16 Chapter 22 Joe-1 Epilogue: Mutual Assured Destruction Timeline List of Key Characters Notes and Sources Bibliography Index LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn 2. Otto Frisch 3. Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg 4. Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard 5. The faculty of the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory 6. Rudolf Peierls and his wife Genia 7. James Chadwick 8. Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, Vannevar Bush, James Bryant Conant, Karl Compton and Alfred Loomis 9. J. Robert Oppenheimer 10. Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi 11. The world’s first nuclear reactor 12. Leslie Groves 13. Leif Tronstad 14. Damage to the heavy water concentration cells at Vemork 15. The Norsk Hydro Vemork facility 16. The Los Alamos laboratory 17. Klaus Fuchs 18. Theodore Hall 19. David Greenglass 20. Igor Kurchatov 21. The second Alsos mission ‘council of war’ 22. A spherical reactor captured by the Alsos mission 23. The last German experimental nuclear reactor, B-VIII 24. The first ‘Fat Man’ plutonium bomb 25. Oppenheimer and Groves inspect the damage following the Trinity test explosion 26. The mushroom cloud above the ruins of Nagasaki 27. Alan Nunn May 28. Andrei Sakharov About the author Jim Baggott is an award-winning science writer. A former academic scientist, he now works as an independent business consultant but maintains a broad interest in science, philosophy and history, and continues to write on these subjects in his spare time. His previous books have been widely acclaimed and include A Beginner’s Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005), Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy and the Meaning of Quantum Theory (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Perfect Symmetry: The Accidental Discovery of Buckminsterfullerene (Oxford University Press, 1994).