Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon

The history of the atomic bomb is intertwined with the history of World War II, which itself grew out of the alliances and consequences of World War I. This conflict began in Europe in August 1914 and pitted the central powers—primarily Germany and Austria-Hungary—against the “Triple Entente” of Britain, France, and Russia. Expected to last a month, it quickly became bogged down in trench warfare that persisted for more than four years and killed 20 million people. The tide turned when the US entered the war on the side of the Triple Entente, forcing the central powers into submission. The subsequent peace treaty imposed severe economic penalties on Germany and also extracted some of its territory.

Germany transformed into the democratic Weimar Republic, but many Germans chafed at the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles. Beginning in 1929, a massive, worldwide economic meltdown (the Great Depression) impoverished much of the US and Europe. Germans became sympathetic to a new movement, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, which argued that the Jewish people had sold out the country during WWI and that its real destiny was to dominate Europe. Hitler won the top office of chancellor early in 1933, and within months he transformed the weakly democratic country into a dictatorship. He placed restrictions on Jewish people and soon had them rounded up in concentration camps.

As the Great Depression dragged on, Hitler rebuilt the German military. He allied with Italy, Spain, and Hungary in 1937, forming the Axis powers. In 1938, German forces took over Austria and Czechoslovakia. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland and quickly conquered it; by mid-1940, Hitler’s forces had captured most of Europe. Hitler ordered aerial bombardments of London and other English cities and, in 1941, invaded the USSR, breaking the two powers’ former treaty and leading to three brutal years of fighting.

Since the mid-1800s, Japan had rapidly industrialized, and by 1937 it controlled Korea and much of China. It joined the Axis powers and, late in 1941, launched a series of rapid attacks across east Asia, beginning with a raid on the US military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The US, which had until this point only offered assistance to the Allies, now entered the war itself, and by the summer of 1945, America, Britain, and the Soviet Union had defeated the Axis powers.

All told, 80 million people died during World War II. Some of the war’s final casualties occurred during America’s surprise nuclear attack on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bomb tells the story of the Allied race to make those weapons before the Axis powers could build their own.