Drawing on declassified material such as MI6's Farm Hall transcripts, coded Soviet messages cracked by American cryptographers and interpretations by Russian scholars of documents from the Soviet archive, Jim Baggot's monumental book spans ten historic years, from the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 to 'Joe-1', the first Soviet atomic bomb test in August 1949.
It includes dramatic episodes such as the sabotage of the Vemork heavy water plant by Norwegian commandos and the infamous meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, the subject of Michael Frayn's stage play Copenhagen.
Baggott also tells of how Allied scientists were directly involved in the hunt for their German counterparts in war-torn Europe following D-Day and brings to light the reactions of captured German scientists on hearing of the Allied success at Hiroshima.
Atomic is an epic story of science and technology at the very limits of human understanding; a tale barely believable as fiction, which just happens to be historical fact.
