Locked behind barbed wire in a secret desert town, the best minds from half the globe wrestled with the hardest scientific problem of the age. Every day they failed to solve it, thousands died on the battlefields of World War II. Their success, if it came, would end the war - with instant death to thousands more in a blinding nuclear flash.
Samuel Freed took his brand-new physics degree to Los Alamos. There he spent his days working alongside Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, and other greats of science, striving to unleash the colossal energies trapped in the atom. He spent his nights, some of them, with a married woman trapped in secrets of her own.
A chance remark put Freed in charge of designing Little Boy, the bomb that would obliterate Hiroshima. His scientific advances brought him to a problem no science could solve: the struggle with his conscience over setting loose the most devastating weapon mankind ever imagined.