The Last Days of World War II July 15-July 21 (2005– ) watch online HD

The bomb. Here we have General (formerly Colonel) Leslie Groves, a no-nonsense Army engineer who had just built the Pentagon in 1940, put in charge of a horde of scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico, with the mission of building a couple of atomic bombs. The physicists are mostly academics from places like Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley, and Cornell. They all have PhDs while Groves may be a general but he has no PhDs.

Furthermore, engineers don't particularly like physicists -- snobs who walk around with their heads in the clouds and never get their hands dirty while the engineers do all the heavy lifting For their part, the professors aren't really snobbish. They're just completely indifferent to the engineers.

Want to see a sublime miniseries on the Manhattan project? See if you can get hold of a BBC production called "Oppenheimer" with Sam Waterston as the eponymous figure. (Avoid the by-the-numbers feature with Paul Newman.) Oppenheimer was quite a guy. Skinny, almost skeletal, with the gaunt but not unhandsome features of a movie villain, and with eyes that seemed hypnotic.

He claimed that a quotation from Indian scriptures, the Baghavad Gita, ran through his mind when the test bomb exploded in the desert: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." I've sometimes wondered if that tale is true. No atomic physicist, no matter how smart, should be able to read Sanskrit let alone quote from a 700-verse piece of Hindu scripture, even one set on a battlefield.

Also covered in less detail: The USS Indianapolis' delivery of the bomb parts to Tinian Island, whence the Enola Gay would take off; the meeting of Churchill, Truman, and Stalin at Potsdam, calling for Japan's unconditional surrender; and the splitting up of Germany into its four components.