Featured Book - March 2002

RACING FOR THE BOMB
GENERAL LESLIE R. GROVES, THE MANHATTAN PROJECT'S INDISPENSABLE MAN

Robert S. Norris

IN THE FALL OF 1942, when he was handed the job of building the atomic bomb, Colonel Leslie R. Groves was a career officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, fresh from building the Pentagon - the world's largest office building. In this full-scale biography Norris puts Groves at the center of the Manhattan Project where he was and where he belongs, replacing the scientists who have traditionally been at the heart of the story. In just over one thousand days Groves drove manufacturers, construction crews, scientists, industrialists, military and civilian officials to come up with the money, the materials and the plans to solve the thousands of problems he faced. It is evident that he was the right man at the right place for the job.

The book treats Groves' central role in the planning, timing and targeting of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions revealing new insights into the complex and controversial questions surrounding the “decision” to drop the bomb on Japan. Groves also had a deep imprint on the nuclear age that followed. Procedures and practices of his Manhattan Project became the building blocks of the “national security state” and the “military industrial complex” that came to characterize key institutions of post-war America.

Groves comes through as a recognizable American type, the take-charge, can-do figure who gets the job done against formidable odds. Norris’s research draws upon new sources including archival material, family letters and documents. The book includes several photographs, not previously published.