Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen BombIn this work of history, science and politics, Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, tells for the first time the secret story of how and why the hydrogen bomb was made; traces the path by which "the Bomb", the supreme artifact of twentieth-century science and technology, became the defining issue of the Cold War; and reveals how close the world came to nuclear destruction before the United States and the former Soviet Union learned the lesson of nuclear stalemate - a stalemate, Rhodes makes clear, that forced the superpowers to tenuous truce for more than four decades, in the end bankrupting and destroying the Communist state and foreclosing world-scale war. From the day in September 1941 when the first word of Anglo-American atomic-bomb research arrived in Moscow via Soviet espionage to the week of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Curtis LeMay goaded President Kennedy to attack the USSR with everything in the US arsenal, this book is full of unexpected - and sometimes hair-raising - revelations based on previously undisclosed Soviet as well as US sources. |
Contents
Preface to the Sloan Technology Series | 13 |
Deliveries | 17 |
Part One A Choice Between Worlds | 25 |
Copyright | |
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Acheson agent Air Force Alamos Altshuler Alvarez American Army asked atomic bomb atomic energy atomic-bomb Beria Bethe Bohr Borden Bradbury British Brothman Carson Mark Committee Communist Curtis LeMay David Greenglass defense deuterium Edward Teller espionage explosion FBI FOIA files fission Fuchs's German going Gold FBI FOIA Gold's Golovin Gouzenko Greenglass FBI FOIA Groves H-bomb Harry Gold hydrogen bomb Igor implosion interview isotope JCAE Julius Kapitza Khariton Klaus Fuchs knew Korea Kurchatov laboratory Lamphere later LeMay's Lilienthal Los Alamos Manhattan material meeting Mike military Moscow National neutrons NKVD nuclear officer Oppenheimer's Pervukhin plutonium President proposed quoted ibid radiation reaction reactor recalled remembered Robert Oppenheimer Rosenberg Russian Ruth Ruth Greenglass Sakharov Sarov says scientists Soviet Union Stalin Strauss Super Terletsky thermonuclear thought told tritium Truman Ulam United uranium USAEC USSR Vandenberg wartime Washington weapons wrote Yatzkov Yuli Khariton Zukerman