Karl Z. Morgan was a physicist at the Manhattan Project and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he was director of health physics from the late 1940s until his retirement in 1972. He collaborated with leading trial lawyer Ken M. Peterson to write this extraordinary memoir about the dawn of the nuclear age and the moral dilemmas associated with nuclear energy.

A deeply humane and religious scientist, Morgan regards his own role, in meeting the challenges presented by the "angry genie" of nuclear energy, with the same unblinking eye he focuses on government, the military, and the nuclear industry. He tells harrowing tales of radiation accidents and near-disasters, and shows the actual and potential consequences of the clumsiness, recklessness, and carelessness of fallible human beings.