Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Era of the New Deal)

General Leslie M. Groves presents a first-person account of the Manhattan Project, the effort to build the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos. As the ranking military officer overseeing the project, Groves hired J. Robert Oppenheimer as scientific director, despite knowledge of Oppenheimer's left-wing background. Groves was responsible for marshaling personnel and materials, planning facilities to extract enriched uranium, and ensuring that research and weapon assembly proceeded without interruption. Groves describes the political, logistical, and personal challenges of this ambitious and expensive engineering undertaking. The project involved coordination with foreign governments, press censorship decisions, construction of major plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge, and a race to complete the bomb before Nazi Germany could develop atomic weapons. The book includes a new introduction by physicist Edward Teller, who was present at Los Alamos. Teller assesses both Groves's and Oppenheimer's contributions to the project and reflects on the legacy of their work.