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