BOMB: The Race to Build - and Steal - the World's Most Powerful Weapon

The weekend I read BOMB: The Race to Build - and Steal - the World's Most Powerful Weapon, I talked and thought of little else. I turned down my best friend's offer to join her for a pool party, I barely spoke to my boyfriend and I went to a BBQ where I told everyone with whom I spoke how much I wanted to get home to finish my book. And then, of course, I told them ALL about it.

It was by far the most riveting book I've read in years. And it was nonfiction, to which I usually claim indifference, but very different from the nonfiction I have read. The book follows all the major players (mostly physicists and spies) in the creation of the atomic bomb during WWII and the Soviet attempts to steal it from the United States.Why did I not know these people before? Robert Oppenheimer? Leslie Groves? Ted Hall? Knut Haukelid?! How have men with such exciting, important contributions to World War II escaped my notice until now? And how did I not know about the KGB's intricate network of spies in the U.S.? I actually learned several things that I feel I should have known long ago. Like the fact that the Soviet Union actually stole the model for the atomic bomb from us. Yeah, I should have known that.

One of my favorite (true!) stories from the book was that of the Norwegian resistance fighters and the Vemork heavy water plant. See, Hitler "held tight to the world's only supply" (p.75) of heavy water which is one of the few materials that "can be used to slow down neutrons and create a chain reaction in uranium." Thus, the British and the Americans were very interested in destroying the German's heavy water plant (Vemork) in Norway to retard their progress in developing the bomb. Enter Knut Haukelid and the Norwegians. After escaping Norway and getting trained at a special spy school in Great Britain, they blind parachuted into northern Norway and cross-country skied to the plant. Instead of approaching Vemork across the heavily guarded suspension bridge that was the only entrance, they hiked down into the gorge in the middle of the night and then scaled the vertical rock face with their bare hands. Because they're Norwegian. And then the ten men broke into the plant, destroyed the heavy water machinery and escaped on skies toward Sweden. Perhaps best of all: "not a single one of the Norwegians was ever caught" (p.87).

I also want to tell you about how the Germans started to rebuild the plant and what Knut did to thwart those efforts and what the German physicists said post-war about how much the destruction of Vemork stunted their progress toward the atomic bomb, but there just isn't time. You simply must read the book.