Extended Summary
The Manhattan Project is arguably the most significant achievement by a collection of individuals in the history of man. In a period of less than three years, during the middle of a world war, under the leadership of General Leslie Groves, employing the collective energy of a hundred thousand of its citizens, the United States was able to create the scientific and industrial wherewithal needed to build an atomic bomb.
How did this happen? Of the eight nations that knew in 1942 that an atomic bomb was possible, why was the United States the only nation able to make one? And, after discovering that no one else had the ‘bomb’, why did the US decide to use it?
Duo Chi (Two Xes), Book I of Nuclear Generation, will answer those questions, and do so not in droll historical and scientific arcana but through the exciting stories of the principals.
This historical novel is part science, part history, but mostly a morality tale. The lead character, Will Townsend, is purely fictional. However, his life intertwines with some of the most famous people of the mid twentieth century, including Roosevelt, Churchill, Oppenheimer, and several Nobel Laureates. The situations where Townsend interacts with them actually did occur, and at the times and places depicted. While the dialogue is necessarily the product of the author’s imagination, it is grounded in his research into the personalities of these principals.
During his two-year effort researching the history of the Manhattan Project, the author read many of the original technical papers published before the war which alerted the technical establishment in the advanced countries to the possibility of a nuclear bomb. This story captures the excitement of these discoveries, the anxiety over who would actually succeed in making such bombs, and the marvel of the effort that enabled the US to do so.
The reader will witness the growth of Will Townsend from a wet-behind-the-ears undergraduate to a competent scientist, from a devoted son to a loving husband, from a rural neophyte to a mature cosmopolite. Will’s story is one of patriotism, moral courage, and human frailty. It is a reflection on the irony that one’s shortcomings could take on greater personal significance than the moral implications of the use the atomic bomb.
Will is witness to, and victim of, the change of heart by many Manhattan Project scientists about the use of their ‘creation’. His soul-searching leads him to contemplate an action that could render future nuclear weapons impotent. The evil tactics of a key government official who exploits Will’s personal failings pushes him over the edge. The result sets the stage for Book II in the series, Duo Filii (Two Sons), and creates a problem that President Obama must now resolve. |
