Winner of the Western History Association’s Robert G. Athearn Award for outstanding book on the twentieth-century American West

Just before dawn on July 16, 1945, the world’s first nuclear bomb was detonated at Trinity Site in an isolated stretch of the central New Mexico desert. It may have been the single most important event of the twentieth century. The Day the Sun Rose Twice tells the fascinating story of the events leading up to this first test explosion, the characters and roles of the people involved, and the aftermath of the bomb’s successful demonstration.

With J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” at last getting his Hollywood close-up in Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster film Oppenheimer, readers can discover the background behind the world’s first atomic blast in Ferenc Morton Szasz’s award-winning history. “Tightly focused, lucidly written, and thoroughly researched,” according to the New York Times Book Review, the book provides “a valuable introduction to how our nuclear dilemma began.”