Pandora's Keepers: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb

Many books have tried to shed light on why the greatest minds of 20th century physics designed the most horrific weapon in history. Brian VanDeMark tries a new tack in Pandora's Keepers: the group biography. Instead of focusing on just Oppenheimer, or Bohr, or Teller, this book encompasses the nine men at the core of the United States' effort to build an atomic bomb. By avoiding individual stories, he reveals that these men collectively were more than the sum of their brilliant parts.
It was no secret that Hitler was attempting to achieve nuclear fission, and many of the nine were Europeans who had seen the horrors of the Third Reich up close. Beyond any care for ethics or morals, they wanted to beat Hitler to the Bomb. But though they functioned as a scientific juggernaut together, some of the men suffered pangs of anxiety when alone. Leo Szilard, for instance, feared the results of his early experiments.

Szilard flipped the switch, saw the dreaded pulses, and watched them for several minutes with mounting horror.... "That night," Szilard later recalled, "there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief."

Readers of Richard Rhodes' classic Making of the Atomic Bomb will find some new insights here as VanDeMark casts a wide net for relevant details. Pandora's Keepers tells this familiar story with new energy and immediacy, bringing to life the difficult drama of science in wartime. --Therese Littleton