The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making & Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb

Journalist Graff (When the Sea Came Alive) delivers a magisterial oral history of the atomic bomb. The book opens by tracing enigmatic statements about the atom from the ancient Greeks to Isaac Newton (“No ordinary power [can] divide what God himself made”) before getting to the 20th century, at which point the mysteries of the atomic world begin to crash into the brutalities of the political one (German physicist Werner Heisenberg: “A young man pressed a red handbill into my hand, warning me” that Jewish scientist Albert Einstein’s modern physics was “entirely alien to the German spirit”). Soon Einstein writes his fateful letter to Franklin Roosevelt, warning him of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type,” and Roosevelt approves a special project devoted to such a bomb’s creation. (One administrator notes this as a remarkable leap of faith, given that the project “could only be tested at full-scale” and was based on nothing but “some figures on a piece of paper.”) Graff collates fascinating details about life at Los Alamos, where families, whose identities were shrouded in secrecy, were known by Army personnel as simply “the creeps.” When the first bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, Graff conveys both the monumental nature of the task and the incomprehensible horror it wrought (“I felt colors. It wasn’t heat”; “I felt I was throwing up my internal organs”). The result is a stunning account that brings to the fore the nuclear saga’s surreal combination of ingenuity, fate, and terror. (Aug.)