“...An intriguing investigative work...”
Piergiorgio Odifreddi, La Repubblica

“...Nice and crisp...” – Thomas Powers,
Pulitzer Prize winner journalist and author
of “Heisenberg’s War”

"...Filled with interesting nuggets...”
Martin Sherwin, Pulitzer Prize winner author

“...Stefania Maurizi's has performed a valuable service...”
Robert S. Norris, author of “Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project's Indispensable Man”

“...A good book...”- Romeo Bassoli, Il Messaggero

Introduction

“I was the only one to receive that information. It was confidential, and one of the conditions for letting me go was that I not talk to anybody about what I had learned”. When the magnificent ninety-five year-old seated in front of me in an old studio opposite the British Museum utters these words, my attention is distracted for a moment. And in that moment I see this book before me, as it’s today.

A certain event occurred which changed history forever. It was the making of the atomic bomb, which “inaugurated” the nuclear era, when for the first time in the history of our civilisation man acquired the ability to destroy the human species in a single blow. In the beginning was the atomic bomb.

The story of the first bomb is a tale full of paradoxes, contradictions and mysteries. As a mathematician, contradictions strike me; as a journalist I can’t stay away from murky matters. But this book is not the umpteenth history of the atomic bomb. In fact a myriad of articles and books, many excellent, already exist on that theme. This book is a patchwork of stories.

After meeting that elderly man in London, I spent two years tracking down nine people in order to  ask them to tell me their stories, each time marvelling at how in the last sixty years our world has depended on the passions of these men. My interviewees are ten scientists and top level protagonists of the nuclear era who experienced that enterprise from various angles. They worked for Stalin or for the Nazis, gave away atomic secrets or lived in secret towns, advised the powerful or threw in the towel or, finally, were in Hiroshima upon the explosion of the bomb. All of their stories are intertwined, both with each other and with history. Placed side by side in the space of few pages they reveal paradoxes, mysteries and contradictions, while the patchwork they create reassembles the pieces of a mosaic: a fresco of the nuclear era from its dawn up to the present day…..