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Atomic Spies:
Containing the War's Most Explosive Story:
Barely a month before World War II began, Albert Einstein wrote President Roosevelt suggesting that nuclear fission might yield "extremely powerful bombs of a new type..." By 1942, America's Manhattan Project was coordinating secret labs from New York to Chicago to Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Developing an atomic bomb posed monumental challenges, in science and secrecy. Researchers were tireless in hiding their work, erecting a cloak of invisibility so impenetrable that not even Vice President Truman knew of it until becoming president.
Enemy spies suspected much, but learned little. Allied spies were another matter. Several scientists and technicians at the Los Alamos lab were Communist sympathizers who passed critical information to the Soviet Union, America's wartime partner and postwar rival. |