About the Author: Samuel Goudsmit was born in The Netherlands and in 1925 he and fellow student George Uhlenbeck discovered electron spin. In 1927 he emigrated to the U.S., working at the University of Michigan and later at MIT until being detailed to the War Department to participate in the Alsos Mission. He served as a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1954 to 1970 and was the founder of Physical Review Letters.

Alsos was a scientific intelligence mission launched by the Allies in the autumn of 1943 to determine the progress of German research on the atom bomb. With the suspense of a thriller, Goudsmit recounts the circumstances leading up to the mission, the methods its participants used to do their scientific sleuthing, and the reaction of the German scientists on the day the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima. With a new introduction by David Cassidy