THE BASTARD BRIGADE: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb

Imagine if the first atomic bomb had come from Nazi Germany. At the beginning of World War II, it was far ahead of allied countries in nuclear research: the Uranium Club was created two years before the Manhattan Project. The fear of the German nuclear project was so great that some people were expecting an atomic bombing of London as early as the end of 1943. Irene Joliot-Curie was hiding radium from the Germans who invaded France (as her mother Maria had done in World War I). The editor of a German scientific journal pulled information from physicists and engineers and passed it on to the West. Britain was throwing in special forces to blow up a heavy water plant in occupied Norway. The brother of the future U.S. president Kennedy was training to fly an airplane packed with explosives; using rudimentary electronics, it was supposed to be dropped on bunkers for Vau missiles, which were thought to carry atomic charges. And after the Allied landings on the continent, former Whiteguards, a baseball player, and a friend of the Uranium Club's chief physicist were on a real hunt for German scientists.