From the editor : Preserving the Manhattan Project / Cynthia C. Kelly --
Introduction : A great work of human collaboration / Richard Rhodes --
Section 1 : Explosive discoveries and bureaucratic inertia --
Thinking no pedestrian thoughts / Richard Rhodes --
The atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands / H.G. Wells --
If only we had been clever enough / Leona Marshall Libby --
What wasn't expected wasn't seen! / Edward Teller --
I had come close but had missed a great discovery / Philip Abelson --
Enlisting Einstein / William Lanouette --
Albert Einstein to F.D. Roosevelt / Albert Einsten and Franklin D. Roosevelt --
A practically irresistible super-bomb / Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls --
Working for Otto Frisch / J. Wechsler --
Likely to lead to decisive results / The Maud Report, March 1941 --
Wild notions about atomic bombs / G. Pascal Zachary --
Transatlantic travails / Andrew Brown --
Section 2 : An unprecedented alliance --
The rather fuzzy state of our thinking / James Hershberg --
The stuff will be more powerful than we thought / Vannevar Bush --
You'll never get a chain reaction going here / Richard Rhodes --
The Chicago Pile-1 : the first chain reaction / Enrico Fermi --
Fermi was cool as a cucumber / Crawford Greenewalt --
Proceeding in the dark / Leslie R.Groves --
Swimming in syrup / Robert Jungk --
The Los Alamos primer : how to make an atomic bomb / Robert Serber --
These were very great men indeed / Richard Feynman --
Misunderstandings and anxieties / Stephane Groueff --
A weapon of devastating power will soon become available / Niels Bohr to Winston Churchill --
One top secret agreement too many / Winston Churchill --
Section 3 : An extraordinary pair --
His potential outweighed any security risk / Leslie R. Groves --
Scientific director for the special laboratory in New Mexico / James B. Conant and Leslie R. Groves to J. Robert Oppenheimer --
When you looked at Captain Groves, a little alarm bell rang "caution" / Robert S. Norris --
Decisive, confident and cool / Robert DeVore --
A bureaucratic warrior of the first rank / Robert S. Norris --
The biggest S.O.B. / Kenneth D. Nichols --
Not right, do it again! / John Lansdale, Jr. --
A "Jewish Pan" at Berkeley / Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin --
The absent-minded professor / Berkeley Gazette, February 14, 1934 --
His head wreathed in a cloud of smoke / Edward Gerjuoy --
A psychiatrist by vocation, and a physicist by avocation / Jeremy Bernstein --
The most compelling man / Jennet Conant --
Appeasing General Groves / Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin --
Visions of immortality / Robert S. Norris --
An audacious gamble / Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin --
When Robert Oppenheimer walked onto the page / Joseph Kanon --
Doctor Atomic : the myth and the man / John Adams --
A cascade of different Oppenheimers / Jon Else --
Section 4 : Secret cities --
A new and uncertain adventure in the wilderness / Stephane Groueff --
A crazy place to do any war thing / Stirling Colgate --
Excitement, devotion, and patriotism prevailed / J. Robert Oppenheimer --
The case of the vanishing physicists / Stanislaw Ulam --
Learning on the job / Rebecca Diven --
Life at P.O. Box 1663 / Ruth Marshak --
A boy's adventures at Los Alamos / Dana Mitchell --
Something extraordinary was happening here / Katrina Mason --
A relief from the hubbub of the hill / Katrina Mason --
An SED at Los Alamos / Benjamin Bederson --
A bad time to get a new boss / Joseph Kanon --
Tumbleweed and jackrabbits in the Evergreen State / Steve Buckingham --
Making toilet paper / Roger Rohrbacher --
Termination winds / Michele Gerber --
Whoever gets there first will win the war / Leon Overstreet --
The whole project was like a three-legged stool / Walter Simon --
Cover stories / Franklin T. Matthias --
K-25 Plant : forty-four acres and a mile long / William J. Wilcox --
Tennessee girls on the job / Colleen Black --
Ode to life behind the fence / Clifford and Colleen Black --
Operating Oak Ridge's "calutrons" / Theodore Rockwell --
Men, write home for Christmas / Norman Brown --
An answer to their prayers / Valeria Steele --
All-Black crews with white foremen / Robert Bauman --
Manhattan Project sites in Manhattan / Robert S. Norris --
Manhattan Project sites in Washington, D.C. / Robert S. Norris --
Monsanto's playhouse for polonium / Stephane Groueff --
Mysteries at the Met lab / Isabella Karle --
Section 5 : Secrecy, intelligence and counterintelligence --
Unprecedented security measures / Robert S. Norris --
Security : a headache on the hill / Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin --
Mrs. Farmer, I presume / Laura Fermi --
As if they were walking in the woods / John Lansdale, Jr. --
Electric rocket story fails to launch / Charlotte Serber --
A spy in our midst / Laura Fermi --
Never in our wildest dreams / Lilli Hornig --
The youngest spies / Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel --
Enormoz espionage / Gregg Herken --
Jump start for the Soviets / David Holloway, Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel --
Holes in the security fence / Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel --
A calming role for the counterintelligence corps / Thomas O. Jones --
The Alsos mission : scientists as sleuths / Robert S. Norris --
From France to the Black Forest : seeking atomic scientists / Richard Rhodes --
I have been expecting you / John Lansdale, Jr. --
Section 6 : The Trinity Test --
Leaving the bomb project / Joseph Rotblat --
Anticipating the end of war / Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin --
Scientists will be held responsible / Arthur Holly Compton --
Advising against the bomb / The Franck Report, June 1945 --
No acceptable alternative / The Interim Committee Report, June 1945 --
Scientists petition the President / Leo Szilard and other scientists --
Watching Trinity / Thomas Farrell and Leslie R. Groves --
Babysitting the bomb / Donald Hornig --
A handful of soldiers at Trinity / Val Fitch --
Eyewitness accounts of the Trinity Test / Edwin McMillan, Kenneth Greisen, Enrico Fermi, Maurice Shapiro, Robert Serber --
Violence without limit / Joseph Kanon --
Section 7 : Dropping the bombs --
Aiming for military and psychological effects / Target Committee --
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz : born too soon / Frederick L. Ashworth --
The 509th Composite Group at Tinian Island / Stephen Walker --
Official bombing order, 25 July 1945 / Thos. T. Handy --
A very sobering event : operational history of the 509th Bombardment --
Massive pain, suffering and horror / Tsuyoshi Hasegawa --
Miss Yamaoka, you look like a monster / Richard B. Frank --
For all we know, we have created a Frankenstein! / Paul Boyer --
The battle of the laboratories / Harry S. Truman --
The culmination of years of Herculean effort / Henry L. Stimson --
Eyewitness over Nagasaki / William Laurence --
It was over! / Frederick J. Olivi --
The atomic bomb's peculiar "disease" / George Weller --
Section 8 : Reflections on the bomb --
Outwitting General Groves / Harold Agnew --
Speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists / J. Robert Oppenheimer --
You have done excellent work / J. Robert Oppenheimer --
A citizen's guide to the atomic bomb : The Smyth Report / Henry DeWolf Smyth --
Hersey's Hiroshima / John Hersey --
The decision to use the atomic bomb / Henry L. Stimson --
History is often not what actually happened / Barton J. Bernstein --
A question of motives / Patrick M.S. Blackett --
Thank God for the atomic bomb / Paul Fussell --
The return to nothingness / Felix Morley --
The bomb in national memories / Tsuyoshi Hasegawa --
Hiroshima in History / J. Samuel Walker --
Why does this decision continue to haunt us? / Gar Alperovitz --
Section 9 : Living with the bomb --
On the international control of atomic energy / Acheson-Lilienthal Report, March 1946 --
Open letter to the United Nations / Niels Bohr, June 1950 --
I hope not a soul will remember my name / Paul Mullins, "Louis Slotin Sonata" --
Atoms for peace / Dwight D. Eisenhower, December 1953 --
A cold war warning / The Russell-Einstein Manifesto, July 1955 --
A world free of nuclear weapons / George P. Schultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn --
The nuclear threat / Mikhail Gorbachev --
Thoughts on a 21st-century Manhattan Project / George A. Cowan --