12 Seconds of Silence: How a Team of Inventors, Tinkerers, and Spies Took Down a Nazi Superweapon, Hardcover

The riveting story of the American scientists, tinkerers, and nerds who solved one of the biggest puzzles of World War II--and developed one of the most powerful weapons of the war.​

12 Seconds of Silence is the remarkable, lost story of how a rag tag group of American scientists overcame one of the toughest problems of World War II: Shooting things out of the sky.

Working in a secretive organization known as Section T, a team of physicists, engineers, and everyday Joes and Janes created one of the world's first "smart weapons"--the proximity fuse. The tiny gadget allowed an artillery shell to "know" when to explode to bring down an aircraft. Against overwhelming odds and in a race against time, mustering every scrap of resource, ingenuity, and insight, the scientists of Section T would eventually save countless lives, rescue the city of London from the onslaught of a Nazi superweapon, and help bring about the Axis defeat. A holy grail sought after by Allied and Axis powers alike, the fuse ranks with the atomic bomb as one of the most revolutionary technologies of the Second World War. Until now, its tale was largely untold.

For fans of Erik Larson and Ben Macintyre, set amidst the fog of espionage, dueling spies, and the dawn of an age when science would determine the fate of the world, 12 Seconds of Silence is a tribute to the extraordinary wartime mobilization of American science and the ultimate can-do story.

Jamie Holmes is a writer living in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in print or online in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, the Christian Science Monitor, the New Republic, the Atlantic, Foreign Policy, USA Today, and the Daily Beast.