There were nine of them: men with names like Oppenheimer, Teller, Fermi, Bohr, Lawrence, Bethe, Rabi, Szilard, Compton--brilliant men who believed in science and who saw before anyone else the awesome workings of an invisible world. They came from many places, some fleeing Nazism in Europe, others quietly slipping out of university teaching jobs, all gathering in secret wartime laboratories to create the world's first atomic bomb. At one secret laboratory hidden away in Los Alamos, New Mexico, they would crack the secret of the nuclear chain reaction and construct the most fearsome weapon mankind had ever known. Together they built a device that could incinerate a city and melt human beings so thoroughly that the only thing left would be their scorched outlines on the sidewalks. During the war, few of the atomic scientists questioned the wisdom of their desperate endeavor. But afterward, they were forced to deal with the sobering legacy of their creation. Some were haunted by the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and would become antinuclear weapons activists; others would go on to build bigger and even deadlier bombs. In explaining their lives and their struggles, Brian VanDeMark superbly illuminates not only their moral reckoning with their horrific creation, but also the ways in which each of us grapples with responsibility and unintended consequences.

The result is not only spectacular history, but a subtle moral investigation of the highest order.- The f.