Manhattan follows the tangled lives of the residents of Los Alamos, New Mexico, as they race to create the first nuclear bomb in history. Locked away in the world's most secretive city, the scientists and their families surrender their freedoms, compromise their marriages, and even sacrifice their sanity to end one war and usher in another - the Cold War waiting just over the atomic horizon - all while embedded spies and a climate of paranoia threaten to destroy the project from within.