Gregg Herken is an emeritus professor of American diplomatic history at the University of California at Merced and the author of “Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller.”

The great advantage of writing nonfiction is that it doesn’t have to be plausible, it only has to be true. That adage certainly seems apt for the story of the making of the atomic bomb: The top scientists of a generation suddenly disappear, only to later surface at a secret laboratory on a remote desert mesa, where they build the ultimate weapon that puts an end to the world’s worst war. You can’t make this stuff up — yet it happened. But there is another might-have-been story full of exotic characters, unbelievable coincidences and cliffhanger moments, a putative historic turning point where history, as it were, failed to turn: the advent of a German atomic bomb in World War II. That story is plausible enough to be the implied premise of a hit series on cable television, “The Man in the High Castle.” Yet the German bomb didn’t happen. The reason is the topic of Sam Kean’s book “The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb.” The bastard brigade of the title was the U.S. scientific intelligence mission, code-named Alsos, tasked with finding out about the Nazi bomb.

Kean centers his narrative on the colorful and unlikely individuals in this drama. In addition to the atomic scientists on both sides, the main figures are Moe Berg, a former major league catcher who became an atom spy and would-be assassin; Samuel Goudsmit, a Dutch-born physicist recruited to Alsos, who spent his time in Europe on the lookout not only for a German bomb but also for his parents, who had been sent to a Nazi concentration camp; and Boris Pash, a former Hollywood High School baseball coach with Russian roots who was put in charge of wartime Army counterintelligence on the West Coast.

“The Bastard Brigade” is a fast-paced and rollicking ride, even though it goes off the rails factually in a few places. Lyman Briggs, for example, was not “a top nuclear scientist” but a security-obsessed physicist — an expert on soils — who nearly put an end to the U.S. bomb project before it began by excluding Enrico Fermi as an enemy alien and locking away the top secrets. The Manhattan Project was not founded on Dec. 6, 1941, but in mid-August 1942, when the U.S. Army formally took over the atomic enterprise. And, while I’m sure Berg was a polymath — dubbed by one writer at the time as “Einstein in knickers” — it strains credulity (even in this tale) that he could have been the atomic-age Zelig that Kean depicts. While the book’s errors and exaggerations do not fatally undermine it, they could easily have been avoided with some fact-checking by the author or his publisher.

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Which leads me to another kvetch about “The Bastard Brigade”: Since there are no footnotes or endnotes, it is impossible for the interested reader to know where Kean gets his information. Likewise, the author makes no attribution to other books that he obviously relied upon in his research (this reviewer’s included). Although this may be a trend in trade publishing — I suppose at least it saves paper — it is a regrettable one.

As fascinating as Kean’s story is, the implicit premise of “The Bastard Brigade” — that the Germans were close to having an atomic bomb — is historically questionable, as even the author himself seems close to admitting. In fact, the Nazi bomb project was probably doomed early on, when German chemist Walther Bothe, distracted by a crisis in his love life, mistakenly concluded that heavy water would be a more suitable moderator than graphite in a nuclear reactor. As Kean correctly notes , Bothe’s miscalculation was “one of the most consequential blunders in science history.” Likewise, I suspect that as soon as theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg realized that building an atomic bomb was more an engineering challenge than a scientific one, Heisenberg, Germany’s Oppenheimer, lost enthusiasm for the project. His “uranium machine” was a pitiful contraption that failed to attain a self-sustaining atomic chain reaction before the end of the war — something the United States had achieved by December 1942.

Finally, even if the Third Reich’s heartland was not being pummeled on a routine basis by Allied air attacks, and even if Hitler had not ordered his scientists to focus their efforts on the V-1 drone and V-2 rocket — the Nazis’ “vengeance” weapons — it is unlikely that German industry would have been able to build an atomic bomb in time; many German experts had come to that conclusion at the start of the war. In 1939, Danish nuclear physicist Niels Bohr, who had mentored both Oppenheimer and Heisenberg, declared that “any immediate use of the latest marvelous discoveries of atomic physics is impracticable,” since any country that desired a bomb would have to turn itself into a factory to build one.

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Bohr’s mistake was in not realizing that the United States was fully prepared to do exactly that. Even after Soviet spies stole the blueprints of America’s atomic bomb, it took Russian scientists three years in a crash effort to make and test a successful copy. The Russians’ proper understanding of the scope and scale of the challenge was reflected in the code word they chose for the Manhattan Project: Enormoz. “Enormous.”

The Bastard Brigade

The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb

By Sam Kean

Little, Brown. 447 pp. $30

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