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

In late spring of 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill visits President Roosevelt. They quickly agree that America and Britain must pool their scientific resources and construct the weapon in America, far from the war zone.

The US War Department, pleased with Colonel Leslie Groves’s management of the construction of the new Pentagon building, chooses him to oversee the atomic bomb program, now dubbed the Manhattan Project. An engineer by training and a hard-charging leader, Groves is told, “You can do it […] If it can be done” (47).

Groves, now a general, tours the country, talking to members of the Uranium Committee and looking for likely leaders of the bomb project. He meets Oppenheimer, who advocates for a central lab where scientists can gather and talk freely instead of inadvertently replicating each others’ work in distant research facilities.

Groves likes Oppenheimer, who seems to know something about every topic except sports. He also likes that Oppenheimer, unlike most other physicists involved in the project, is a native-born American. No one else seems to want Oppenheimer in a leadership role, however. One of Groves’s colleagues says, “He couldn’t run a hamburger stand” (49).

Army intelligence and the FBI identify Oppenheimer as a Communist.