Dawing on declassified material such as MI6's Farm Hall transcripts, coded Soviet messages cracked by American cryptographers and interpretations by Russian scholars of documents from the Soviet archive, Jim Baggott's monumental book spans ten historic years, from the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 to 'Joe-1', the first Soviet atomic bomb test in August 1949. It includes dramatic episodes such as the episodes such as the sabotage of the Vemork heavy water plant by Norwegian commandos and the infamous, impassioned meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. 'Atomic' is an epic story of science and technology at the very limits of human understanding, a tale barely believable as fiction, which just happens to be historical fact.