"Bomb" begins with Otto Hahn discovering nuclear fission in a Uranium atom in Germany. He only split one atom, which released enough energy to make a grain of rice jump, but if there was 50 lbs of Uranium it could -- and would be -- lethal, capable of causing mass destruction. The news spreads quickly, and Germany begins researching how to combine enough of it to make an atomic bomb -- the most dangerous weapon available. The United States learns of this when Albert Einstein sends President Roosevelt a letter, and then FDR assembles a team. This team's job is to beat Germany in building the world's first atomic bomb. Robert Oppenheimer heads this project. They do research at a lab called Los Alamos, located in New Mexico. Oppenheimer hand-picked most of his team at first, but when they were desperate for all the help they could get, he wasn't unable to hand-pick them...and that is where the problems start with the Soviet Union.
Throughout this process, there are Soviet spies whose goals are to relay information back to Soviet Russia so that they would be able to build an atomic bomb as well. It explains some of their meetings, their passwords (to ensure they were meeting with the right person), et cetera. The US and Soviet Union weren't really allies...They both just shared a common enemy.
In the end though, obviously, the United States wins this race. It turns out that Germany was about 2 years behind the United States. Besides this, the Soviet Union recieved all of the research they needed to build their own atomic bomb, thanks to some of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project (another name for the US' atomic bomb research).
But did they really win? This was the catalyst to an arm's race with Russia -- AKA, the Cold War. It's dangerous.
This is "a story of how humans created a weapon capable of wiping our species off the planet. It's a story with no end in sight..."
"And, like it or not, you're in it."
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