The Light of a Thousand Suns

The bomb that ended one war started another—a war we are still fighting against ourselves.

On July 16, 1945, in a New Mexico desert, a light brighter than anything human eyes had witnessed turned sand into glass. Twenty-one days later, that same light rose over a city where 350,000 people were eating breakfast.

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer told the story of the man who built the bomb. The Light of a Thousand Suns tells the story he couldn't see—the grandmother who became a shadow on stone, the doctor who crawled through the ruins searching for his wife, the children who played in radioactive snow, and the soldiers who watched their own skeletons through closed eyelids.

This sweeping work of narrative nonfiction moves between Los Alamos and Hiroshima, between the triumph of physics and the cost in human flesh. You will stand with Leo Szilard as he asks Einstein to sign the letter that started everything. You will crouch in the trenches of the Nevada Test Site with young soldiers ordered to march toward mushroom clouds. You will kneel in the ashes of Nagasaki with a man who found his wife by the rosary melted into her bones.

And you will meet the witnesses—the hibakusha who have spent 80 years testifying to what they saw, whose numbers dwindle each year, whose testimony will soon pass from living memory into history.

The Light of a Thousand Suns does not judge. It does not prosecute or forgive. It simply refuses to let us look away.

The Doomsday Clock stands at 89 seconds to midnight. The questions the bomb raised in 1945 remain unanswered. The choice—whether to abolish these weapons or let them destroy us—belongs to us.

For listeners of American Prometheus, Hiroshima, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb—the missing chapter in the story of the nuclear age.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Or not.

The choice has always been ours.