The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb, and the Fateful Decision to Use It

by Iain MacGregor

448 pages, Paperback

Expected publication July 14, 2026

About the author

Iain MacGregor has been an editor and publisher of nonfiction for over twenty-five years. As a history student he visited the Baltic and the Soviet Union in the early 1980s and has been captivated by Soviet history ever since. He has published books on every aspect of the Second World War on the Eastern Front 1941-45 and has visited archives in Leningrad, Moscow and Volgograd. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Spectator and BBC History Magazine. He lives with his wife and two children in London.

Reviews

[DeWayne Neel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Iain MacGregor, having ancestors involved at the highest level, writes of the build-up to the war in the Pacific, doing excellent research on the brutal nature of war and the moral and ethical decisions that resulted in the atomic bombings. A war like none other, and weapons that were developed to cause mass casualties.

[B.J. Marshall · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like the decision to use nuclear weapons against Japan, this is a difficult assessment to make. OK, it's obviously NOWHERE NEAR as complicated as that. But my point remains, this book seem to oversell in its title what it's actually about. It's not super clear to me what it is actually about, and I've read it. It's supposed to sort of tell the stories of 4 men who all share a significant part of the Hiroshima legacy: the mayor of the town, the pilot who flew the plane, the general who ran the Manhattan Project, and the journalist who told the story to the world at large.

It sort of does this and drifts around a bit in telling other side portions of the story. I made quick work of it, but I guess I kept waiting for the impactful part. Missed it.

It's probably for the best that there isn't much technical detail here, as most of what's here is not quite right to outright wrong. As ever, if you want the technical story of the Manhattan Project read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. If you want technical detail of how the bomb was designed and functioned, read the Los Alamos primer - especially if you have the technical education to keep up with it.

This book ALMOST gets to grappling with the legacy of nuclear weapons but doesn't quite. It doesn't QUITE separate two separate threads of argument: the radiation sickness suffered by victims in the aftermath of the explosion from the lack of long-term habitability of Hiroshima. I've been there - in 2016 - and can assure that it was not left uninhabitable for 70 years as some claimed in 1945. There were clearly many deaths in the days and weeks and years after the bombings because of the effects of the radiation doses received. There's always a question about whether or not the nuclear weapons were really worse than the firebombings and other conventional air raids. Radiation sickness is a different injury, but is it fundamentally different or worse than burns or broken bones or other conventional wounds? I don't know how to answer that question, and maybe the author didn't either. A clearly statement of that would have been preferable to what I think may just be a lack of understanding that there are and were two separate issues being discussed and argued over.

Obviously with only 2 stars as compared to my usual 3 I don't give this book a high recommendation. I was excited to see what it had to say, but was left disappointed. Was that a failure of the book or a failure of my expectations? Maybe it would land better with readers who haven't read as much about the Manhattan Project and aren't nuclear engineers. I think there are better options out there, but this is a bit less hefty than Rhodes and far less technically challenging than the Primer. So maybe there's an audience...?

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was extremely impressed by the completeness of this book, which covered all aspects of the development and execution of the first atomic weapon. I was even more positively impressed by the impartiality of Iain MacGregor, who chose to tell all sides of the event and did not attempt to emphasize one aspect (shortening the war through its deployment vs. criminal conduct on the part of the American military for actually using it against civilians) over another. MacGregor simply wrote the facts as best as he could and interviewed as many people who knew more than he did to help complete his book.