Brighter than a Thousand Suns

Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (1970), by Austrian Robert Jungk, is the first published account of the Manhattan Project and the German atomic bomb project. It studied the making and dropping of the atomic bomb from the view of the atomic scientists. The book is largely based on personal interviews with the people who played a leading part in the construction and deployment of the bombs. In 1956, the book was published in German by Alfred Scherz Verlag with the title Heller als tausend Sonnen. James Cleugh translated it into English and it was published in 1958 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. The name of the book is based on the verse from the Bhagavad Gita that J. Robert Oppenheimer is said to have recalled at the Trinity nuclear test.