In Bomb Power, Garry Wills reveals how the atomic bomb transformed our nation down to its deepest constitutional roots -- by dramatically increasing the power of the modern presidency and redefining the government as a national security state -- in ways still felt today. A masterful reckoning from one of America's preeminent historians, Bomb Power draws a direct line from the Manhattan Project to the usurpations of George W. Bush. The invention of the atomic bomb was a triumph of official secrecy and military discipline -- the project was covertly funded at the behest of the president and, despite its massive scale, never discovered by Congress or the press. Wills persuasively argues that the Manhattan Project then became a model for the covert operations and overt authority that have defined American government in the nuclear era. The wartime emergency put in place during World War II extended into the Cold War and finally the war on terror, leaving us in a state of continuous war alert for sixty-eight years and counting. Both provocative and illuminating, Bomb Power casts the history of the postwar period in a new light and sounds an alarm about the continues threat to our Constitution.
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