A fairly standard practice – a look at the introduction and the last chapter – should give the reader a sense of the book. The introduction provides an overview of the book including its essential question: How can we control experts in a democracy when we don’t know what they’re talking about? The introduction includes a brief discussion of the theme of the book and also its implications.The last chapter develops the title, what Prometheus has to do with the Manhattan Project. It also reviews some of the points of the book. It examines the environmental damage caused by the development of nuclear weapons. It looks at the American policy on assassination which sent an armed American agent to a lecture in Zurich by Werner Heisenberg, head of the German nuclear program. Had Heisenberg referred to progress on a Nazi bomb, he would have been shot dead on the spot. Secrecy is another consequence of the Manhattan Project. It developed as a result of specialization. People knew their own part of the overall effort, but the need to know was a guiding principle of the endeavor. It is ironic that this concern may have facilitated the penetration of the Project by Soviet spies. Few people had a sufficiently broad perspective to realize that spies roamed Los Alamos.Otherwise, a curious reader might simply flip some pages, look at the first page of several chapters, check out the photographs, review the index and the references, and look at the handsome fellow on the back flap of the book jacket. I wrote the book with the purpose of making a complex scientific and political project accessible to interested people. Likely the reader would be no less familiar with the physics of the atomic bomb than I was, and I have tried to make the intricate bureaucratic maneuvers clear as well. The reader will have to decide how successful I might have been, but I’m satisfied that this breezy approach will indicate if tackling the book is worthwhile.The Prometheus Bomb is an extension of teaching. I hope to introduce a question, about experts and democracy, then see it discussed in a variety of forums. Public policy questions that involve science have long been with us, but the future likely will have issues that are barely imaginable.Bioengineering can let us control nature in unprecedented ways. Hybrid creatures fashioned from different species have already been fashioned. Limits that nature has developed over millions of years may tumble quickly as a result of human design. The natural selection that was critical to the Darwinian understanding of evolution could give way to a renewal of eugenics as we consciously select qualities that may or may not improve our prospects against environmental change.We may decide to bypass natural phenomena entirely by combining robots with artificial intelligence. Possibly, these entities will be indistinguishable from humans, and possibly they will be considered a human species themselves. Quite likely, we will have to decide if restrictions on the capacities of these robots should be limited. As with Hal in 2001, it might be possible that the robot declines to be limited by our species. Who will decide how far these experiments may proceed? Who will enforce those judgments? How?Assuming public budgets will support this kind of work, what ethical issues will have to be determined and by what standards? What opportunities will be ignored so that funding for the new projects can proceed?In another area, what instruments of surveillance will help police departments gather evidence? What threats to civil liberties will those instruments introduce?The technology is coming. It’s coming in medicine, the food industry, environmental protection, warfare, domestic security, education and other areas of human endeavor. The Manhattan Project was the first of the great scientific policies with cataclysmic potential for our species. That model of decision making diverted money, presumed secrecy, indulged dangerous experiments with an unknowing public nearby, and applied the product of that work to the deaths of nearly 200,000 people. Before the next grave matter is upon us, we should have a better understanding of how we will meet the challenge.