Preserving the Manhattan Project / Cynthia C. Kelly ; A great work of human collaboration / Richard Rhodes ; Section 1. Explosive discoveries : 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 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, July 1941 ; Wild notions of 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 here / Richard Rhodes ; The Chicago Pile-I: the first chain reaction / Enrico Fermi ; Fermi was as cool as a cucumber / Crawford Greenewalt ; Proceeding in the dark / General 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 be 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 / General Leslie R. Groves ; Scientific director for the special laboratory in New Mexico / James B. Conant and General Leslie R. Groves to J. Robert Oppenheimer ; When you looked at Groves, a little alarm bell rang "caution," / William Whipple ; Decisive, confident and cool / Robert DeVore ; A bureaucratic warrior of the first rank / Robert S. Norris ; The biggest S.O.B. / Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols ; Not right - do it again! / Colonel John Lansdale, Jr. ; A "Jewish Pan" at Berkeley / Edith Jenkins ; The absent-minded professor / Berkeley Gazette, February 14, 1934 ; His head wreathed in a cloud of smoke / Edward Guerjoy ; A psychiatrist by vocation, a physicist by avocation / Isidor I. Rabi ; 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 on to the page / Joseph Kanon ; Doctor Atomic: the myth and the man / John Adams ; A cascade of different Oppenheimers / Jon Else --