The atomic bomb presents a number of paradoxes. It ended a brutal war but also decisively shaped decades of international tension. It stands as a monument to human ingenuity but has more than once threatened the species with extinction. It originated in earnest fear of the consequences of a nuclear-armed Nazi regime but ended by setting new standards for the ease of destruction of civilian populations. It offers startling possibilities for both beneficial and detrimental applications. It represents a formidable scientific and technological advance that simultaneously called into question the value of that very kind of endeavor. One of the defining features of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century worlds, it is often relegated to the back of the mind. Widely bemoaned and regretted, it is assumed to be a permanent fixture of the landscape. And however one defines the idea of “dark creativity” – itself a notion built on a paradox – the atomic bomb would seem to be a near-perfect exemplar of it. The Manhattan Project was a fantastically expensive, logistically daunting, and technologically complex endeavor; its successful completion testifies to the creativity and hard work of numerous leaders and rank-and-file participants. Hans Bethe, one of the leaders of the project, captured some of this spirit with a recollection that of all the laboratories he had worked in, “I have never observed in any of these other groups quite the spirit of belonging together, quite the urge to reminisce about the days of the laboratory, quite the feeling that this was really the great time of their lives” that pervaded Los Alamos (Bethe, 1968, p. 399).