On 2 August 1939, the renowned theoretical physicist Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in which he declared that it might become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium'. He went on to declare that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed'. Shortly after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Congress allocated substantial funds to allow research to be undertaken to follow through on Einstein's idea and build an atomic bomb. Few, if any, could have imagined what they had agreed to support. But what if actual events had taken a different course? _The First Atomic Bomb: An Alternate History to the Ending of WW2_ is a highly accurate, thoroughly researched, alternative history presenting a narrative of events exploring what might have happened if the atom bomb had been available somewhat earlier than it really was. What if the atomic bomb had been ready for deployment in, say, February 1945? Had the atomic bomb been ready sooner, how would this have affected the war in Europe, and in particular Germany's surrender? What would the impact have been in the war in the Pacific against Imperial Japan, and how would the Soviets have reacted? And what would the following Cold War have looked like? These are all questions and scenarios that the author rigorously examines. Solidly based on real people and actual events, in this book James Mangi describes the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb getting an earlier start after President Roosevelt appointed an energetic scientist, Walter Mendenhall, to study the feasibility of the bomb, instead of the more traditional bureaucrat, Lyman Briggs, he actually chose. This scenario, he reveals, might well have produced a war-ending atomic bomb earlier, the effects of which rippled through the post-war world.

While German and Japanese scientists also laboured unsuccessfully to create an atomic bomb, by the summer of 1945, the American-led team was ready to test its first weapon. As the clock ticked down to the detonation time of 05.30 hours on 16 July 1945, the nervous team of technicians and scientists waited ten miles away from Ground Zero' deep in the New Mexico desert. No one knew how powerful the explosion would be or whether even at such a distance they would be safe from the blast. Even so, some chose to observe the detonation from a point four miles nearer at the control bunker; but then no one was even sure that the bomb would work. What if that is actually what happened? Under schedule pressure from the White House, the scientists assembled the device in part with tape and tissue paper, knowing some components were flawed. These are verifiable facts. It means that, as many of those who gathered in the New Mexico desert feared at the time, the bomb might not have worked during that first test. In The First Atomic Bomb, Jim Mangi explores what might happened in the event that the world's first atomic bomb had not been ready for use when it was. How would this have affected the end of the war in the Pacific, and indeed the Second World War as a whole? Would Emperor Hirohito's armed forces have battled on? When might Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, at the controls of his Boeing B-24 Superfortress Enola Gay have then made his historic flight over Hiroshima - and would that city even have remained the target? How would Stalin and the Soviets have reacted to such developments, and how would this have played out in the post-war world?