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The time was 1944, a critical period in World War II. The Allies were just beginning to get a foothold on the Axis stronghold. But Hitler was stubbornly holding back the pressure and bragging about his secret arsenal of super-weapons. Intelligence reports were coming in of huge concrete installations and underground constructions, and Allied scientists were feverishly searching for the anser to the one crucial question that plagued their governments: Did the Nazis have the secret of the Atomic bomb? To find the answer Col. Borish T. Pash was directed to head a dangerous intelligence operation at times through the front lines of both the Allies and the Axis. Its code was the Alsos Mission.
Near the end of World War II, as Allied armies swept across battle-torn Germany and leading scientists at Los Alamos were racing to assemble the atomic bombs America would drop over Japan later that summer, General Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project, established Alsos, a unit of scientists, soldiers, and secret agents to find the Nazi Germany’s physicists and technicians working on the development of a German atomic bomb and to determine how far along they were. In this book, Samuel Goudsmit, the Dutch-American physicist who was the scientific leader of the Alsos mission, recounts the mission and its findings. “Alsos is more than a dramatic chronicle of how Goudsmi...
Scientists have always kept secrets. But rarely in history have scientific secrets been as vital as they were during World War II. In the midst of planning the Manhattan Project, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services created a secret offshoot - the Alsos Mission - meant to gather intelligence on and sabotage if necessary, scientific research by the Axis powers. What resulted was a plot worthy of the finest thriller, full of spies, sabotage, and murder. At its heart was the 'Lightning A' team, a group of intrepid soldiers, scientists, and spies - and even a famed baseball player - who were given almost free rein to get themselves embedded within the German scientific community to stop the most terrifying threat of the war: Hitler acquiring an atomic bomb of his very own. While the Manhattan Project and other feats of scientific genius continue to inspire us today, few people know about the international intrigue and double-dealing that accompanied those breakthroughs. Bastard Brigade recounts this forgotten history, fusing a non-fiction spy thriller with some of the most incredible scientific ventures of all time.
At the end of World War II, J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of America's preeminent physicists. For his work as director of the Manhattan Project, he was awarded the Medal for Merit, the highest honor the U.S. government can bestow on a civilian. Yet, in 1953, Oppenheimer was denied security clearance amidst allegations that he was "more probably than not" an "agent of the Soviet Union." Determined to clear his name, he insisted on a hearing before the Atomic Energy Commission's Personnel Security Board.In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer contains an edited and annotated transcript of the 1954 hearing, as well as the various reports resulting from it. Drawing on recently declassified FBI fi...
he U.S. Army played a key role in the formation and administration of the Manhattan Project, the World War II organization which produced the atomic bombs that not only contributed decisively to ending the war with Japan but also opened the way to a new atomic age. The volume begins with a prologue, designed to provide the reader with a brief survey of the history of atomic energy and to explain in layman’s terms certain technical aspects of atomic science essential to an understanding of the major problems occurring in the development of an atomic weapon. Early chapters describe the beginning of the Army’s atomic mission, including the formation of the Manhattan District, the first step...
The first full history of US nuclear secrecy, from its origins in the late 1930s to our post–Cold War present. The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered scientific facts that made such powerful weapons possible. The totalizing scientific secrecy that the atomic bomb appeared to demand was new, unusual, and very nearly unprecedented. It was foreign to American science and American democracy—and potentially incompatible with both. From the beginning, this secrecy was controversial, an...
"Much as Marcel Proust spun out a lifetime of memories from the taste of a madeleine, The Uranium Club spins out the history of Nazi Germany's failed World War II atomic-bomb project by tracing the whereabouts of a small, blackened cube of Nazi uranium. It's a riveting tale of competing German ambitions and arrogant mistakes, a nonfiction thriller tracking teams of American scientists as they race to prevent Hitler from beating the United States to the atomic bomb." —Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb Tim Koeth peered into the crumpled brown paper lunch bag; inside was a surprisingly heavy black metal cube. He recognized the mysterious object instantly—he had one jus...
At a time when the Manhattan Project was synonymous with large-scale science, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67) represented the new sociocultural power of the American intellectual. Catapulted to fame as director of the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory, Oppenheimer occupied a key position in the compact between science and the state that developed out of World War II. By tracing the making—and unmaking—of Oppenheimer’s wartime and postwar scientific identity, Charles Thorpe illustrates the struggles over the role of the scientist in relation to nuclear weapons, the state, and culture. A stylish intellectual biography, Oppenheimer maps out changes in the roles of scientist...
In the depths of World War II, fresh Assassin Eddie Gorum uncovers Templar plans to create a devastating new weapon at the dawn of the atomic age.
Presents a redacted version of the closed hearing pertaining to Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer conducted by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission Personnel Security Board for four weeks in April and May, 1954 from which security classified information is deleted.