Lasse Hallstrom ("The Shipping News") has come onboard to direct the A-bomb thriller "Bombshell" as a potential starring vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio, reports Variety
"Bombshell" is an adaptation of "Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy," by former Moscow-based journalists Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel. It was published by Times Books in 1997.
The book is a sympathetic portrait of Theodore Hall, a physics prodigy recruited for the Manhattan Project while still a teenager. Although the youngest participant in the development of the atomic bomb, Hall feared an American monopoly on nuclear secrets and passed classified data to the Soviet Union. He was never prosecuted, though historians claim he may have started the Cold War.