Garrett M. Graff’s The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making & Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb is a deep dive into past that we shouldn’t look away from, and one that we should continue to remember
Image: Andrew Liptak
August 2025 marked the 80th anniversary of first use of nuclear weapons in warfare, unlocking a frightening new era of warfare that has persisted ever since. Tied to the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks came a new book: The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making & Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb, by Garrett M. Graff. It’s a gripping, in-d…
Garrett M. Graff’s The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making & Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb is a deep dive into past that we shouldn’t look away from, and one that we should continue to remember
Image: Andrew Liptak
August 2025 marked the 80th anniversary of first use of nuclear weapons in warfare, unlocking a frightening new era of warfare that has persisted ever since. Tied to the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks came a new book: The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making & Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb, by Garrett M. Graff. It’s a gripping, in-depth look at how the United States stood up its atomic bomb program and how it was the product of a massive, nation-wide effort, while also presenting a disturbing picture of its consequences.
Earlier this year, I interviewed Graff on conjunction with a book that he edited for my day job, edited Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont. He pointed out something about his approach to history that has stuck with me since:
One of the challenges of writing narrative history is that there is a tendency to make things feel too preordained, that we know where the story ends up. One of the strengths of oral history is that it allows you to better capture the chaos and confusion and uncertainty of living through historic events at the time.
Our collective knowledge of the Second World War goes something like this: the war began overseas, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, we invaded Europe, then we dropped a pair of atomic bombs on Japan, ending the war. It’s a clean and clear-cut retelling, one that ignores the complicated nature of any conflict, but also largely ignores that the war’s outcome was far from certain for a very long time.
War is always complicated: whether it’s piecing together the individual movements taken on a battle or figuring out how a complicated strategic plan came together, there’s a wealth of decisions that people make in the moment that shape the direction of a conflict. Graff’s book is an examination of that complexity, charting the development of the atomic bomb in granular and exhaustive detail.
The story of the atomic bomb is one that long predates the advent of the Second World War, and Graff briefly sets the stage with citations from philosophers dating back to antiquity, musing about the nature and fabric of reality before diving into the advances made in particle physics in the late 1800s and early 1900s as scientists such as Pierre and Marie Curie began to recognize and discover the properties of radiation and the energy that’s locked away on the atomic level. But where Graff really starts this story is in the cluster of European physicists who began to understand that fascism was encroaching on their homes, and began to make plans to escape to the United States, taking their knowledge and expertise with them.
It’s this collection of scientists, Graff points out, who understood the awesome potential that unlocking the atom could unleash under the right conditions. “For the still-tiny circle of scientists who understood the potential of fission,” he writes, “the leap from the theoretical to the potential of an atomic bomb came quickly and with fierce urgency given how many had fled Nazism and the creep of authoritarian regimes of Europe.”
This small collection of scientists saw the writing on the wall: Adolf Hitler and his regime had momentum behind them to take over the continent, and he likely wouldn’t be content with dominating just Europe. At some point, the US would have to intervene. While their research progressed in their new homes, they worried about what advances Germany might make with the scientists who remained, like Werner Heisenberg. They also quickly realized that with a small amount of fissile material, they could theoretically create a bomb with untold destructive power.
By the time the U.S. entered the war after the December 7th, 1941, there were several efforts already underway to study the feasibility of major research and engineering projects, including nuclear weapons, but it wasn’t until August 1942 that the Manhattan Project was officially underway.
From there, Graff follows the growth of the project as its personnel were given extraordinary resources to follow through on their task: develop a functional atomic bomb, as quickly as possible. This was no small task, as the scientists faced the enormous challenge of tackling never-before-attempted engineering and physics problems. They had to figure out the mechanics of creating a nuclear chain reaction and then the engineering to kick off a chain reaction.
While those aspects of the project are the most visible – look no further than Christopher Nolan’s *Oppenheimer *– Graff explains that there’s far more hiding under the surface: there was the monumental task of enriching the uranium required for such a reaction at facilities such as Oak Ridge in Tennessee and Richland in Washington, engineering the individual components that the bomb would require, and training the pilots and crews who would eventually be tasked with transporting and deploying the weapons to their targets.
As Graff explores through his entries, these were incredibly difficult problems to overcome: not just on an engineering and scientific level, but on an organizational and legal one. The U.S. government took over enormous parcel of land and created entire cities and support industries to ensure that they were livable, all under immense secrecy. In many ways, this is one of the most astonishing parts of this story: the speed at which officials were able to establish and run a project of this scale and size is unthinkable, and speaks to the urgency that scientists first urged the government to heed in 1940. Graff recounts stories from the women who were tasked with enriching the uranium – without ever knowing what they were doing – to the workers who were hired to build these hidden cities to the scientists who were constantly worried about falling behind German nuclear efforts and the consequences should they fail.
By the summer of 1945, the project yielded its first successes: Oppenheimer’s scientists determined how to detonate such a device – using shaped explosives to implode and compress the enriched uranium, and they prepared for their first test. But circumstances were beginning to change: following the Allied forces invasion of Europe in June 1944, Germany had been steadily pushed back until it surrendered on May 8th, 1945, leaving the U.S. to press on in the Pacific theater.
Graff highlights that beating their German counterparts – and as it turned out, German officials never really committed to their own nuclear program, thinking that it wouldn’t significantly contribute to their efforts – was an enormous motivating factor for many of the scientists engaged in the project, and that with Germany’s surrender, a number of scientists began to contemplate the role that they were playing in the war effort, the implications that such a weapon would bring with it, and how they might demonstrate this technology to the world. They stood up a committee to look at the big picture and explore the next steps, ultimately deciding that they’d use the bomb against Japan, and they’d do so without warning.
It’s these moments that makes a project such as this so useful to students of history. While it’s worth noting that Graff is essentially showing what little of an iceberg sticks above the water (he explained in a talk that he started with a document that ran into the thousands of pages), surfacing these details – the doubts and concerns that scientists had, the deliberations they made in committees, and the way that they arrived at their decisions shows that while the war effort had a considerable amount of momentum behind it, there was a wealth of arguments, discussion, and planning that drove the program forward day by day. The resulting bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t the product of inevitability, but of deliberation and decision.
Once the Trinity test took place on July 16th, 1945, Graff turns his attention to the war in the Pacific. After a couple of years of bloody, devastating fighting, the U.S. had steadily pushed Japanese forces back island by island at unthinkable cost before turning to a bombing campaign that burned numerous Japanese cities to the ground.
Like the prior sections, he explores the leadup to the attacks in grim detail: the efforts that Boeing undertook to develop the B-29 and customize bombers to carry the atomic bombs, the efforts that various bombardment groups to train for deploying such a weapon, and the horrifying, minute-by-minute journey of each mission that led to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These stories again show just how much human decision-making went into each attack, from the minute steps that carried the bomb forward to the heart-wrenching realization that Nagasaki wasn’t the primary target for that second attack: that was the city Kokura, which was saved only by grace of a thick fog and smoke cover from nearby bombings.
Graff doesn’t use this book to opine on the morality of the bombings, but instead opts to just show the results, bringing out first-hand accounts from the survivors.
Yamaoka Michiko: I felt colors. It wasn’t heat. You can’t really say it was yello, and it wasn’t blue. I simply fainted. I remember my body floating in the air. That was probably the blast, but I don’t know how far I was blown. Futabe Kitayama: I do not know how to describe that light. I wondered if a fire had been set in my eyes. It was something like an ominous purple-like color of sparks caused by a streetcar at night – only some billion times stronger. I don’t remember which came first– the flash of light or the sound of an explosion that roared down to my belly. Hiromu Morishita, ninth grader: It was like being thrown into an iron melting pot. My face was burned and I jumped into the river. One of my friends found me and asked how his face looked. The skin was hanging down from his face like a rag. I was too scared to ask him about my own face.
It’s impossible to look away in the minutes, days, weeks, and months that follow, as people succumb to their horrific injuries and realize that the impact of the bombings weren’t contained to those two August days: the radiation and fallout from the attacks continued to claim lives in horrifying ways.
In the 80 years since our introduction to nuclear warfare, and there’s been no shortage of takes and examinations of everything that’s come in those decades, everything from other books like Frank Close’s Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age* and Pellegrino Charles’ Ghosts of Hiroshima *to films like Kathleen Bigalow’s A House of Dynamite. The Devil Reached Toward the Sky particularly stands out because Graff allows the story to play out in the words of the people who made that complicated chain of decisions that began as a serious thought experiment in the 1930s and which resulted in less than a decade later in the horrifying deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
In many ways, this is a story that’s simultaneously straightforward and complicated, a cautionary tale that explores how we can advance hypotheticals and theories until it’s too late and the consequences become readily and horrifyingly apparent. It’s a story for which we’re still living the consequences, not just of what the hundreds of thousands of people engaged in the Manhattan Project accomplished, but also the recognition of how quickly our best-intended efforts, knowledge, and motivations can change the world.
But that’s a realization that comes only after the fact, once the hypothetical became reality. I don’t know – and this book holds no answers for how things might have turned out in different circumstances, but for all of the decisions and choices that we made along the way, I can’t help but think that we had to find all of this out the hard way – that we had to touch our hand to a hot stove to truly realize the consequences. Books such as this serve to remind us of the terrible cost of that understanding.
Hopefully, it’s a lesson that we’ll continue to remember.