A young adult award winning (Newberry Honor, Sibert Medal) account of the making of the world’s first nuclear bomb and attempts by the Russians to steal the secret. As an overview of people and events, the book is a quick and easy starting point. Robert Oppenheimer, man-genius, with perhaps communist leanings, is aware that the Nazis are striving to build an atomic bomb of their own. Unable to discover how far along the Germans have gotten, American scientists in a frenzy of patriotism rush to aid Oppenheimer. Either the U.S. figures out to how build an atomic bomb first, or the Germans will win World War II.
Concurrently, Russia is an American ally, and American spies sympathetic to communism’s promise of equality for all smuggle inside information from Los Alamos to Soviet handlers. Bomb delivers all the important names, dates, motivations, and more than a little suspense. What it leaves largely unasked are several questions of morality. Why were Americans, especially a disproportionate number of Jewish Americans, so willing to ascribe to communist ideologies? Was the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan necessary? When WW II ended, was it justifiable to import former Nazi scientists to the United States so the Russians could not access them? How did the Cold War that followed immediately on the heels of WWII lead to anti-communist witch-hunts in the U.S. and are we once again heading toward a government led by anti-constitutional leaders willing to deport or black-list anyone they consider enemies?
