Day One: Before Hiroshima And After

Description for DAY ONE: BEFORE HIROSHIMA AND AFTER by Peter Wyden:

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 ll 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 does more, far more, than retell the story of Hiroshima; it breaks through the myths that have accumulated around the greatest and most sinister event of human history, to reveal the doubts of men who made the bomb, the ignorance of those who were call upon to make the decision to use it, the fact that even those who had designed the weapon "did not know what it was"---or guess what its fearsome aftereffects would be.

Peter Wyden has drawn on fresh eyewitness interviews and documents never before published to trace today's nuclear stalemate to its historical roots and to answer the questions that still surround the building and the use of the bomb. Why did so many scientists ignore its deadly long-term radiation effects, then dismiss them as a "hoax"? Why did the World War II decision-makers fail to order a systematic study of the option of staging a demonstration of the bomb? Why was a bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the second of the "fifty nuclear weapons the scientists eventually planned to use against Japan?

DAY ONE shows how the nuclear age was the child of errors and misunderstanding: President Roosevelt's belief that the Germans were ahead of the United States in a "race" to make the bomb, when in fact Hitler assigned a low priority to his A-bomb project; President Truman's conviction that he was merely continuing FDR's "policy" to drop the bomb, when in fact no such policy existed.

Wyden illuminates the scientific breakthroughs and the espionage: the manipulations and false assumptions by the highest policy-makers 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.

Above all, he describes the ambition and the fallibility of his brilliant eccentric leading characters: Leo Szilard, the conspiratorial Hungarian who took the idea for an A-bomb from science fiction and persuaded Einstein to sell it to Roosevelt; the enigmatic genius Dr. J Robert Oppenheimer, who created the bomb in Los Alamos and suppressed the opposition to its use; the abrasive General Leslie R Groves, who ran the Manhattan bomb project like a dictator; the cunning Dr. Edward Teller, who refused to work on the A-bomb so that he could develop his own obsession, the hydrogen superweapon; the gentle Yoshio Nishina, who almost committed suicide because he had failed to build the bomb for Japan.

How the scientists, politicians and, in fact, mankind mastered nuclear science---and were then mastered by it---makes riveting, important reading. 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, Day One of what may be---because of the decisions that were taken and the mistakes that were made forty years ago---the final chapter in the story of mankind.