Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb

In "Trinity", the illustrator Jonathan Fetter-Vorm tells the history of the race to build and the decision to drop the first atomic bomb, and the ethical debates that followed. He sets the stage with early research in Europe, which began prior to World War I and accelerated rapidly as World War II approached. He takes special care to explain the process of a nuclear chain reaction, transporting the reader into a splitting atom in the vivid way that only a graphic book can. The action then shifts to Los Alamos, and Fetter-Vorm showcases the strong personalities of the physicists under the supervision of the Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer and high-level military personnel. These men and women wrestled daily with both the difficulty of building an atomic weapon and the moral implications of actually succeeding. When the first bomb finally went off at a test site code-named Trinity, the world was irreversibly thrust into a new and far more dangerous age. Richly illustrated and deeply researched, "Trinity" is dramatic, informative, and thought-provoking.