During the final weeks of World War II in Europe, as Allied armies swept across a chaotic, battle-torn Germany, two teams of the world's leading nuclear scientists were desperately at work. One team, sequestered in the New Mexican desert, hastened to assemble the atomic bombs that would shake the world later that summer. The other team, a group of Nazi-sponsored physicists and technicians in southern Germany, struggled to do something that, unbeknownst to them, the Allies had done two years earlier: build a critical, self-sustaining nuclear reactor. Meanwhile, a different kind of team was running its own race against time. Convinced (erroneously) that the Germans were close to creating their own superweapon, the Allies sent an American unit of scientists, soldiers, and secret agents established by Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves into Nazi Germany. Their orders: find the German scientific team before they could provide Hitler with atomic power. The scientific head of the mission: a Dutch-American physicist named Samuel A. Goudsmit. The mission code name: Alsos.

Includes index.

The fear of a German atom bomb -- We prepare to investigate German science -- The need for secrecy -- Operation Cellastic -- Operation Toothpaste -- Operation Jackpot -- We meet some German colleagues -- The breakthrough -- Operation Humbug -- Hiroshima and the German scientists -- The misorganization of German science -- The uranium club -- The Gestapo in science -- The efficiency of German industry -- It can't happen here.