An account of the race to build humankind's most destructive weapon. This book draws on declassified material, such as MI6's FarmHall transcripts, coded Soviet messages cracked by American cryptographers in the Venona project, and interpretations by Russian scholars of documents from the Soviet archives. Spanning ten historic years, from the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 to 'Joe-1', the first Soviet atomic bomb test in August 1949, Atomic is the first fully realised popular account of the race between Nazi Germany, Britain, America and the Soviet Union to build atomic weapons. Rich in personality, action, confrontation and deception, Jim Baggott's book tells an epic story of science and technology at the very limits of human understanding.