Bestselling author and journalist Garrett M. Graff produced an engrossing oral history of D-Day, WHEN THE SEA CAME ALIVE, which released in 2024.

Now, with THE DEVIL REACHED TOWARD THE SKY, Graff has written an equally compelling book about the three-year project to create the atomic bomb. This was “a crash wartime effort…with whole new cities and facilities carved out of mountains and deserts to employ hundreds of thousands of people…in the hope of building a bomb more powerful than any before and all of it…classified and cloaked in silence and mystery.”

"[R]eaders immediately will become absorbed in the daily decisions and details that went into the extraordinary development of the bomb."

The 500 voices that make up this impressive oral history include physicists Niels Bohr (whose code name was “Nicholas Baker”), Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer (who got pushback when he suggested that the scientists join the military and wear uniforms), and numerous other key figures who might not be quite as well known.

Graff acknowledges that this subject has been covered by many others, including historian Richard Rhodes and filmmaker Christopher Nolan, but his book puts flesh on the bones of history. He quotes the wives of the scientists; military men responsible for planning and executing the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Japanese survivors of the bombings; and those involved in the inevitable coverup. He also highlights the thoughts of those who were there at the creation --- and how they felt looking back on their participation.

THE DEVIL REACHED TOWARD THE SKY can be read straight through or dipped into over time. Whichever way it is approached, readers immediately will become absorbed in the daily decisions and details that went into the extraordinary development of the bomb. 

The final, cautionary word from Albert Einstein stands as an epitaph: “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth: rocks.”