Rhodes came to national prominence with his 1986 book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", a narrative of the history of the people and events during World War II from the discoveries leading to the science of nuclear fission in the 1930s, through the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among its many honors, the 900-page book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in English alone, as well as having been translated into a dozen or so other languages.