In August of 1946, General Leslie Groves, Chief of the Manhattan Project, ordered 60 young officers to Sandia, New Mexico. In a project so wrapped in secrecy that few know of it even a half-century later, Groves charged them to learn how to assemble the early and highly complex atomic bombs. With that goal accomplished, they established a school to train additional assembly teams and the weaponeers and bomb commanders needed for the services' atomic-capable aircraft. Although the wartime atomic scientists believed such tasks lay beyond the ken of military personnel, the Sandia Pioneers soon maintained even the bombs' fissionable cores and assisted the Atomic Energy Commission scientists and technicians in their pursuit of improved bomb designs. The secret history of the young officers who replaced the scientists that had assembled the first atomic bombs, proving that the military was capable of building and maintaining the atomic stockpile, is told here.

Possessed of a very special skill, the Pioneers also contributed to the construction and assembly facilities aboard aircraft carriers and at airbases in the United States and England. With the AEC lacking enough technicians to conduct the 1948 atomic tests at Eniwetok, Groves sent many of the Pioneers to assist scientists testing improvements in the design of bombs' fissionable cores. Those tests demonstrated that the new designs increased the bombs' yield while making better use of scarce plutonium, thereby permitting a dramatic increase in the size of the atomic stockpile.

This compelling, highly readable book focuses on the men who shaped the events that led to secession and the Civil War. Secessionists tore at the bonds that bound Americans to one another and their government as they maligned Northerners and found sinister intent in federal policy. But equally as adamant on the opposite side were the determined abolitionists and others in the North who sought to hold the Union together. Tariffs, the loss of political power, and the antislavery movement were all taking their toll on the South, but it took specific individuals and groups to bring to action the causes they believed in and thus to alter the course of history. The Men of Secession and Civil War, 1859-1861 traces the period from John Brown's 1859 Harper's Ferry raid to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter and the subse-quent secession of the Upper South states in April 1861. The cast of characters in this book includes abolitionists John Brown and Salmon P. Chase; President Abraham Lincoln; U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas; Andrew Johnson, whom Lincoln named his vice president in 1864; secessionists Jefferson Davis, Roger Taney, and Barnwell Rhett; John Breckenridge, the 1860 presidential nominee of the Southern Democratic Party; and Tennessee Senator John Bell. The Men of Secession and Civil War is a useful volume for Civil War courses.