Racing for the Bomb: Leslie Groves and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age

Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a special 90-minute online conversation with historian Robert S. Norris, author of Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project’s Indispensable Man. This event will spotlight the overlooked military mastermind who turned atomic theory into wartime reality: Lt. Gen. Leslie R. Groves.

The Manhattan Project looms large in American memory—Los Alamos, Trinity, Hiroshima—but few remember the man who made it all possible. In Racing for the Bomb, Norris reveals how Groves, often dismissed as a caricature of military bluster, was in fact the indispensable architect of the atomic age. From selecting the sites at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos to coordinating vast industrial-scale construction, international uranium acquisition, bomb design, and the formation of the elite 509th Composite Group of B-29s, Groves ran his own army, treasury, and state department—all under a veil of secrecy.

Robert S. Norris, a leading nuclear historian and former analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, brings to life the driven, brusque, and deeply ambitious general whose personal force of will—combined with keen judgment and boundless energy—shaped not just the bomb, but the postwar national security state that emerged from its use. Groves pioneered “black budgets,” security clearances, and compartmentalized intelligence—hallmarks of Cold War secrecy.

Racing for the Bomb is the first full scholarly biography of Groves, completing the unfinished work of historian Stanley Goldberg and offering an authoritative, readable, and revealing portrait based on Groves’s private papers, military records, and firsthand interviews.

Don’t miss this chance to explore the atomic age from a new perspective: not from the scientist’s lab bench, but from the general’s war room. Norris will discuss Groves’s pivotal role in the decision to use the bomb, his fraught but productive relationship with J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the lasting implications of his management style on U.S. defense and intelligence structures.

We’re grateful to UPMC for Life for sponsoring this event!