With renewed atomic saber-rattling now within our societies, two new books on the bomb and the men who built it

Garret Graff’s ‘The Devil Reached Toward the Sky’ and Iain MacGregor’s ‘The Hiroshima Men.’

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Excerpt from first link above: After three decades of uneasy slumber since the end of the Cold War, atomic weapons are back in the headlines:

There were Vladimir Putin’s threats to use them in Ukraine or send them up into space. They appeared suddenly on the “escalation ladder” when tensions flared up between India and Pakistan. And it was the looming threat of a rogue nuclear-weapons program that forced President Trump to use B-2s in Iran to extinguish that threat, at least for now.

The time certainly looks ripe for not one but two books on the dropping of the very first atomic bomb, on Aug. 6, 1945, with Garrett Graff’s “The Devil Reached Toward the Sky” and Iain MacGregor’s “The Hiroshima Men.” Eighty years on, after countless books, documentaries and major motion pictures, is there anything more to be said on the subject?

Happily for both authors, the answer is yes.