Here, for the first time, in a brilliant, panoramic portrait by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is the definitive, often shocking story of the politics and the science behind the development of the hydrogen bomb and the birth of the Cold War.

Based on secret files in the United States and the former Soviet Union, this monumental work of history discloses how and why the United States decided to create the bomb that would dominate world politics for more than forty years.

Richard Rhodes is the author of numerous books and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He graduated from Yale University and has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Appearing as host and correspondent for documentaries on public television's Frontline and American Experience series, he has also been a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT and is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Visit his website RichardRhodes.com.

Contents

Preface to the Sloan Technology Series

Prologue: Deliveries

Part One

A Choice Between Worlds

1. 'A Smell of Nuclear Powder'

2. Diffusion

3. 'Material of Immense Value'

4. A Russian Connection

5. 'Super Lend-Lease'

6. Rendezvous

7. 'Mass Production'

8. Explosions

9. 'Provide the Bomb'

10. A Pretty Good Description

Part Two

New Weapons Added to the Arsenals

11. Transitions

12. Peculiar Sovereignties

13. Changing History

14. F-1

15. Modus Vivendi

16. Sailing Near the Wind

17. Getting Down to Business

18. 'This Buck Rogers Universe'

19. First Lightning

20. 'Gung-ho for the Super'

Part Three

Scorpions in a Bottle

21. Fresh Horrors

22. Lessons of Limited War

23. Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors

24. Mike

25. Powers of Retaliation

26. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer

27. Scorpions in a Bottle

Epilogue: 'The Gradual Removal of Prejudices'

Acknowledgments

Notes

Glossary of Names

Bibliography

Index