Berthoud Community Library District

In December of 1938, almost by accident, German chemist Otto Hahn experimented with uranium and found that its atoms split when put next to radioactive material. When word got out, physicists and chemists across the United States, Great Britain, Germany and the Soviet Union raced to find a way to make a bomb by splitting the atom.

"Their average age was twenty-five. They came from Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, London, Chicago--and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure, or at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship as they were forced to adapt to a rugged military town where everything was a secret, including what their husbands were doing at the lab. They lived in barely finished houses with P.O. box addresses in a town wreathed with barbed wire, all for...

Joan Stanley is a widow living out a quiet retirement in the suburbs when, shockingly, the British Secret Service places her under arrest. The charge: providing classified scientific information, including details on the building of the atomic bomb, to the Soviet government for decades. As she is interrogated, Joan relives the dramatic events that shaped her life and beliefs: her student days at Cambridge, where she excelled at physics while challenging...

Traces the development of the atomic bomb from Leo Szilard's concept through the drama of the race to build a workable device to the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima.

In 1945, when the Americans liberate the Bikini Atoll from the Japanese, fourteen-year-old Sorry Rinamu does not realize that the next year he will lead a desperate effort to save his island home from a much more deadly threat.

In the aftermath of the surrenders of Germany and Japan in October 1945, Cletus Frade and his colleagues in the OSS are given the life-threatening task of maintaining security during a covert U.S. deal with Germany for intelligence about the identities of Soviet spies in the American atomic bomb program.

A deadly web of deceit ensnares two spies with a complicated personal history in this electrifying tale of World War II
Eva Bernhardt was a naive twenty-year-old when the rakish spymaster William Hobbs seduced her into working for the British secret service. Now, a year later, she is a tough and cynical operative stationed in Berlin, her hatred of the Nazis matched only by her distrust of the man who abandoned her to the whims of MI6....

This book is a powerful and unflinching account of the enduring impact of nuclear war, told through the stories of those who survived. On August 9, 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a small port city on Japan's southernmost island. An estimated 74,000 people died within the first five months, and another 75,000 were injured. Published on the seventieth anniversary of...

"Millions have vanished . . . War has erupted around the globe . . . Cities have been ransacked and overrunwith lawlessness . . . Yet this is only the beginning of the chaos that is to come. Emma Grady has seen civilization collapse and New York gutted by nuclear attack. Amidst this international crisis, she and her growing family of outcasts must unravel the meaning of these strange and horrifying events, even as they struggle to survive. On the...

"From the acclaimed author of Speak comes a kaleidoscopic novel about Robert Oppenheimer--father of the atomic bomb--as told by seven fictional characters J. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist, a champion of liberal causes, and a complex and often contradictory character. He loyally protected his Communist friends, only to later betray them under questioning. He repeatedly lied about love affairs. And he defended the use of the atomic bomb...