Day One, Before Hiroshima and After [Hardcover] Wyden, Peter

Description

Hiroshima was an event of such magnitude that it divided history into two periods, before the bomb, and after it–‘Day One’ of a new age, in which all life would be at risk. Here in all its drama is the untold story of the dawn of that new age–the creation and the use of the atomic bomb. Never before have all the strands–scientific, political, moral, military and human–been woven together with such authenticity and such skill as to provide the reader with a full understanding of how the bomb was created and why it was used. ‘Day One’ illuminates the scientific breakthroughs and the espionage: the manipulations and false assumptions by the highest policymakers on three continents; the extraordinary secret life in three American cities where 100,000 people worked to build the bomb–and the reality of Day One in Hiroshima, where 130,000 people died. Because of the decisions that were taken and the mistakes that were made, it is, for the first time, the complete unvarnished account of the greatest and most dangerous gamble in the long history of the human race.