Dark sun by Richard Rhodes | Open Library (original) (raw)
"In 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."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects
Hydrogen bomb History Audiocassettes Long Now Manual for Civilization Hydrogen bomb -- History
Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. [689]-703) and index.
Published in
New York
Series
Sloan technology series
The Physical Object
Pagination
731 p. :
Number of pages
731
Edition Identifiers
Open Library
OL1279280M
ISBN 10
068480400X
LCCN
OCLC/WorldCat
LibraryThing
Goodreads
Work Identifiers
Work ID
OL2617721W
Source records
- Scriblio MARC record
- Collingswood Public Library record
- Ithaca College Library MARC record
- Internet Archive item record
- marc_openlibraries_phillipsacademy MARC record
- marc_openlibraries_sanfranciscopubliclibrary MARC record
- Library of Congress MARC record
- marc_scms MARC record
- amazon.com record
- marc_columbia MARC record
Work Description
In 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.
Excerpts
EARLY IN JANUARY 1939, nine months before the outbreak of the Second World War, a letter from Paris alerted physicists in the Soviet Union to the startling news that German radiochemists had discovered a fundamental new nuclear reaction.
added anonymously.