"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...

It follows the tangled lives of the residents of Los Alamos, New Mexico, as they race to create the first nuclear bomb in history. Locked away in the world₂s most secretive city, the scientists and their families surrender their freedoms, compromise their marriages, and even sacrifice their sanity to end one war and usher in another, the Cold War waiting just over the atomic horizon, all while embedded spies and a climate of paranoia threaten to...

Tells the story of Edith Warner, who lived in Los Alamos at the time of the Manhattan Project and was a friend to both the Indians of San Ildefonso Pueblo and the scientists working on the atomic bomb.

After a chance meeting in 1981, Lily Fialka confronts the defining time of her life: 1943–45 in Los Alamos, when her physicist husband, Peter, worked on the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project - a time of isolation, hard work, temptation, and loneliness, yet exhilaration and triumph; when great breakthroughs were made, but lives felt narrow; when loyalty was paramount, but the need for secrecy created unbearable tension. At the same time,...

"This is a collection of true stories of children coming to age under the routine threat of global annihilation and how they routinely coped with thinking about the unthinkable" -- back cover.

High on a mesa in the mountains of New Mexico, a small town hides a dreadful secret. On a morning very soon there will be an accident that triggers a terrible chain reaction, and the world we know will be wiped out. James Oberhelm, a reporter at Los Alamos National Laboratory, already sees the devastation, like the skin torn off a moment that is yet to be. He believes he can prevent an apocalypse, but first he must escape the devices of a sensuous...

Maggie's enforced move to New Mexico during World War II with her scientist father creates friction between them as he becomes more and more involved in his secret work.