Rich in personality, action, confrontation and deception, Atomic is the first fully realized popular account of the race between Nazi Germany, the USSR, the USA and Great Britain, in the midst of World War Two and its immediate aftermath, to build humankind's most destructive weapon.
The book draws on declassified material such as MI6's Farm Hall transcripts, coded Soviet messages cracked by American cryptographers in the Venona project and interpretations by Russian scholars of documents from the Soviet archives.
Jim Baggott weaves these threads into a monumental book that spans ten historic years, from the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 to the aftermath of 'Joe-1', August 1949's first Soviet atomic bomb test. It includes dramatic episodes such as the sabotage of Vemork's heavy water plant by Norwegian commandos, made into a film starring Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris, and Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg's meeting in Copenhagen, the subject of Michael Frayn's play.
Baggott also tells of how Allied scientists were directly involved in the hunt for their German counterparts in war-torn Europe following D-Day; and brings to light of the reactions of captured German scientists on hearing of the Allied 'success' at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Why did physicists persist in developing the atomic bomb, despite the devastation that it could bring? Why, despite having a clear head start, did Hitler's physicists fail? To what extent did the Soviet atomic programme rely on intelligence gathered by spies such as Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, David Greenglass and the Rosenbergs? Did the Allies really plot to assassinate a key member of the German bomb programme? Did the physicists knowingly inspire the arms race?
Atomic is an epic story of science and technology at the very limits of human understanding; a tale barely believable as fiction, which just happens to be historical fact.
Doctor Atomic, an opera based on the life of Robert J. Oppenheimer, starts at the English National Opera's London Coliseum on February 25th - click here for more details.
Jim Baggott is an award-winning science writer whose previous books include A Beginner's Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005) and Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy and the Meaning of Quantum Theory (OUP, 2004).
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