At twenty-nine minutes past five on the morning of July 16, 1945, a light brighter than the sun split the New Mexico darkness. The temperature at its center exceeded the interior of the sun. A thin man with haunted blue eyes watched through welding glass and reached for a line of Sanskrit poetry: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Human beings had seized fire from the gods themselves.
But to understand how we arrived at this terrible morning, we must begin fifty years earlier, in a darkened laboratory in Bavaria, where Wilhelm Röntgen saw something impossible: a fluorescent screen glowing when it should not have been glowing, revealing the bones inside his wife's hand. "I have seen my death," Bertha said. She was not wrong.
In Paris, Henri Becquerel left uranium salt in a drawer and discovered that atoms were tearing themselves apart, releasing energy from nowhere. A young Polish woman named Maria Skłodowska worked with the glowing blue substances barehanded, not knowing they would kill her slowly over thirty years. Her notebooks remain so radioactive they are stored in lead-lined boxes.
In Manchester, Ernest Rutherford fired alpha particles at gold foil and discovered that the atom was mostly empty space, with almost all its mass concentrated in a tiny nucleus one hundred thousand times smaller than the atom itself. "It was almost as incredible," he said, "as if you fired a fifteen-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you."
In Berlin, James Chadwick found the neutron, the key that would unlock the nucleus. In London, a Hungarian refugee named Leo Szilard stood at a traffic light and realized that if one neutron could release two, and two could release four, then within eighty doublings every atom in a mass would be involved. A chain reaction. A bomb.
"That night," Szilard recalled, "I knew the world was headed for sorrow."
We follow the refugee physicists fleeing Hitler's Germany—Einstein, Fermi, Teller, Wigner, Szilard—carrying in their minds the knowledge that would decide the war. We watch Lise Meitner, the Austrian physicist who discovered fission on a snowy Christmas Eve in Sweden, denied the Nobel Prize that should have been hers. We stand in the squash court beneath the University of Chicago stadium where Fermi built the first nuclear reactor, where humanity first controlled the fire at the heart of matter.
And we return to the desert, where Oppenheimer and his team of brilliant, haunted men tested the weapon that would end one war and define all wars that followed.
The discovery that the universe contained hidden fires, that atoms could be split, that mass could become energy in accordance with Einstein's equation—this was the moment when human knowledge crossed a threshold from which there is no return. We learned something that cannot be unlearned. We built something that cannot be unbuilt.
A journey through fifty years of physics, from invisible rays in a darkened laboratory to a mushroom cloud rising over the desert, and the chain of discoveries that gave humanity the power to destroy itself.