The shocking and significant story of how the White House and Pentagon scuttled an epic Hollywood production

Soon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called ‘the most important story’ he would ever film: a big budget dramatisation of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon.

Over at Paramount, Hal B. Wallis was ramping up his own film version. His screenwriter: the novelist Ayn Rand, who saw in physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer the model for a character she was sketching for Atlas Shrugged.

Greg Mitchell’s The Beginning or the End chronicles the first efforts of American media and culture to process the Atomic Age. A movie that began as a cautionary tale inspired by atomic scientists aiming to warn the world against a nuclear arms race would be drained of all impact due to revisions and retakes ordered by President Truman and the military for reasons of propaganda, politics, and petty human vanity (this was Hollywood).

Mitchell has found his way into the lofty rooms, from Washington to California, where it happened, unearthing hundreds of letters and dozens of scripts that show how wise intentions were compromised in favour of defending the use of the bomb and the imperatives of postwar politics. As in his acclaimed Cold War true-life thriller The Tunnels, he exposes how our implacable American myth-making mechanisms distort our history.

‘Greg Mitchell is the best kind of historian, a true storyteller.’ - Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus

‘MGM’s little-seen 1947 docudrama about the creation of the atomic bomb’ The Beginning or the End’ provides the unlikely but fascinating subject for this rich look at the early nuclear age.‘ -Publishers Weekly

'Excellent research and rich dialogue give Mitchell’s book a novelistic flair as he recounts the battles between MGM and the military over actor choices, deletions, revisions, and retakes concerning fact vs. fiction.’ - Kirkus Reviews

‘This intriguing, behind-the-scenes look at a disjointed creative partnership is sure to be of interest to readers of history and cinema.’ - Library Journal