America's Atomic Spies

摘要

The story of the U.S. "front-line" intelligence effort to assess the Nazi nuclear weapons program during World War Ⅱ has usually taken the form of a minor footnote in the narrative about the Manhattan Project, America's successful effort to fabricate a fission weapon. Many of the scientists who joined the Manhattan Project did so out of a fear that the Nazis would be first to acquire a nuclear weapon, especially since some of the leading physicists and chemists of the day-Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, and the French scientist Frederic Joiot-Curie-were alive and well and busily conducting research inside Nazi-occupied Europe. As Vince Houghton reports in this beautifully written and well-researched history, the American scientific and strategic community believed they were in a race with Nazi physics, and they had a nagging fear that they might not win that race. The intelligence effort to discern what the Nazis were up to became a priority for the U.S. scientific and intelligence community during the Second World War.