This is the gold-standard account of the development of the atomic bomb – from the early 20th-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project and the bombing of Hiroshima. It is both a monumental story of scientific discovery and a magnificent human drama; in Rhodes’s own words, ‘the tragic epic of the twentieth century’. We felt that such a great book deserved the two-volume treatment, giving space to both word and image. We've sourced a new selection of 100 photographs, chosen and captioned by the author from specialist archives, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the renowned Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen. The set includes an 8-page foldout of original images from the second-by-second record of the Trinity Test – the world’s first nuclear explosion. Richard Rhodes has also written an exclusive introduction, outlining the dangerous evolution of nuclear deterrence in the 21st century.