James Kunetka

Two ambitious men. One historic mission. With a blinding flash in the New Mexico desert in the summer of 1945, the world was changed forever. The bomb that ushered in the atomic age was the product of one of history's most improbable partnerships. The General and the Genius reveals how two extraordinary men pulled off the greatest scientific feat of the twentieth century. Leslie Richard Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers, who had made his name by building the Pentagon in record time and under budget, was made overlord of the impossibly vast scientific enterprise known as the Manhattan Project. His mission: to beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb. So he turned to the nation's preeminent theoretical physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer—the chain-smoking, martini-quaffing son of wealthy Jewish immigrants, whose background was riddled with communist associations—Groves's opposite in nearly every respect. In their three-year collaboration, the iron-willed general and the visionary scientist led a brilliant team in a secret mountaintop lab and built the fearsome weapons that ended the war but introduced the human race to unimaginable new terrors. And at the heart of this most momentous work of World War II is the story of two extraordinary men—the general and the genius.

Groves and Oppenheimer ? The Unlikely Partnership that Built the Atom Bomb

The General and the Genius

Whitley Strieber

Nature's End

With a blinding flash in the New Mexico desert in the summer of 1945, the world was changed forever. The bomb that ushered in the atomic age was the product of one of history's most improbable partnerships. The General and the Genius reveals how two extraordinary men pulled off the greatest scientific feat of the twentieth century. Leslie Richard Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers, who had made his name by building the Pentagon in record time and under budget, was made overlord of the impossibly vast scientific enterprise known as the Manhattan Project. His mission: to beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb. So he turned to the nation's preeminent theoretical physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer—the chain-smoking, martini-quaffing son of wealthy Jewish immigrants, whose background was riddled with communist associations—Groves's opposite in nearly every respect. In their three-year collaboration, the iron-willed general and the visionary scientist led a brilliant team in a secret mountaintop lab and built the fearsome weapons that ended the war but introduced the human race to unimaginable new terrors. And at the heart of this most momentous work of World War II is the story of two extraordinary men—the general and the genius.

Warday and the journey onward

London, today. Construction workers make an extraordinary find: a crude atomic bomb, dating from World War II. Its discovery forces Deputy Home Minister Edmund Ramsden to scour the files of Britain's wartime intelligence for an explanation. What he learns forces his country—and the United States—to confront the last, dark secret of the war. The story shifts back to July, 1945. Young physicist Philip Cavanaugh, working on America's first atomic bomb, is suddenly ordered on a clandestine journey from New Mexico into occupied Germany. His mission: inspect a strange Nazi laboratory lying within the Russian zone. Cavanaugh's dangerous visit—and the fantastic secret he uncovers—draws him into a web of intrigue involving the victorious British, Soviet, and American powers. Kidnapped by British espionage, pursued by the Russians, Cavanaugh manages to return to Washington, D.C., only to face the greatest threat of all: a desperate, last-ditch scheme by the Nazis to annihilate the three Allied capitals with primitive atomic weapons. Scrupulously based on actual historical and scientific developments, Parting Shot is an exciting, fast-paced techno-thriller that rewrites the end of World War II.

James Kunetka

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