Howl's Moving Castle Limited Edition |

Lightbox: ‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb’

May 18, 2026

Richard Rhodes'The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the definitive account of an extraordinary scientific and moral turning point in human history.

For our two-volume Folio book, we sourced a new selection of 100 photographs, chosen and captioned by the author from specialist archives, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the renowned Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen. The set includes an 8-page foldout of original images from the second-by-second record of the Trinity Test – the world’s first nuclear explosion. See below for just a few of those astonishing images, recently shared in our 'Lightbox' feature in the Folio magazine:

This is the gold-standard account of the development of the atomic bomb – from the early 20th-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project and the bombing of Hiroshima. It is both a monumental story of scientific discovery and a magnificent human drama; in author Richard Rhodes’ own words, ‘the tragic epic of the 20th century’.

Blending science, history and storytelling with rare mastery, this Pulitzer Prize-winning book explores how the atomic bomb was not just built but imagined. It’s an extraordinary work of scholarship and a gripping human drama – a reminder of what happens when knowledge and power collide.

Photography: Courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory.