Snake Dance

"The terrifying first use of nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was the most controversial act of warfare in history, dramatically ending the Second World War but ushering in the age of mass destruction. Yet it was also the climax of a story that extends beyond Japan and Washington: the culmination of decades of scientific achievement and centuries of colonial exploitation. [This] is the account of a journey that turned into a quest to discover how humanity reaches this point. Marnham travels from the opulent nineteenth-century palaces of King Leopold II of Belgium, built with riches plundered from the Congo, to the lethally derelict nuclear reactor of modern-day Kinshasa. He follows the shipment of Congolese uranium to the deserts of New Mexico for the Manhattan Project's secret test detonation. And he uncovers the legacies of Robert Oppenheimer and Aby Warburg, two 'mad geniuses' who confronted the devastating force of twentieth-century in very different ways."