Many books have been written about Germany’s nuclear program during World War II. Some claim that Germany was on the verge of making an atomic bomb when the war ended in 1945; others say that there was only a modest research effort, focused mainly on nuclear reactors and energy. The former is a myth that Sam Kean keeps alive in “The Bastard Brigade.”
What Mr. Kean is most interested in is telling stories—especially about those who helped hinder Germany’s progress toward a bomb, a narrative, he tells us, complete with “heroes and villains, conflict and drama, plot twists and redemption.” This book has plenty of those, and the author spends many pages profiling the American spy Moe Berg, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, the Dutch-American physicist Samuel Goudsmit and the American military-intelligence officer Boris Pash, among others—figures who intersect at various points with efforts to slow or sabotage a Nazi bomb. But Mr. Kean overemphasizes the external pressures working against Germany’s progress without acknowledging the internal factors that likely did more to impede the development of a bomb. Heisenberg, Goudsmit, Gen. Leslie Groves and many others later examined in their own writings the reasons why Germany stopped its program short. Unfortunately, Mr. Kean does not. Which is a shame, as that would have made for a more interesting book.
