Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb

Again, following The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Rhodes has done a fantastic job of taking us back to the early days of the nuclear age. The constant underlying theme is that there were alternatives to the constant mutual nuclear terror under which we live every day, but which thankfully, for the sake of our mental and emotional health, we (mostly) don’t obsess over. Were those alternatives ever realistic? Perhaps not. But history has a way of making seem inevitable that which really happened. Part One of this book focusses on Soviet espionage up to the end of World War II. Because of such men as Fuchs, Gold and others, the Soviets had a pretty good idea of what was going on with American bomb developments and were able to “piggyback” and greatly accelerate their own bomb program. Little attention is paid to the details of the American programs at places such as Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, probably because Rhodes has already described these in The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Perhaps the most startling (to me) revelation here is that on August 12, three days after Nagasaki, the U.S. released a report on the Manhattan Project that supplied the Soviet Union with information “nearly equivalent” to that which the Soviets had acquired through espionage during the war. Part Two is a history of the early Cold War years, usually in the context of the development of nuclear weapons. Perhaps most surprising was the meagerness of the U.S.’s nuclear force in the early years. As Lilienthal told Truman, “[T]his defense did not exist. There was no stockpile.” There were no weapons, just “piles of pieces.” At least this one bit of information apparently did not make it to the Soviets, who were busy trying to steal every bit they could. Rhodes describes the attempts at control of atomic weapons at least until 1947, the overriding growing mutual suspicion and distrust between the US and USSR, and the meeting of scientific and mathematical challenges culminating in the “Super,” or hydrogen bomb. We learn, among other things, that the initial problem assigned to the world’s first working electronic digital computer, ENIAC, was the hydrogen bomb. We learn also that there was serious opposition to building the hydrogen bomb at all. Part Three takes us through the designs and tests of the first hydrogen bombs, by the US and USSR, to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The scientific details of the design of “Mike,” the US thermonuclear that vaporized the island of Elugelab in 1952, are as horrifying as they are fascinating. Throughout, Rhodes explores the dichotomy between those who perceived the mutually destructive futility of a nuclear arms race, and those who pushed for ever more bombs with ever bigger “yield.” As Rhodes points out, “nuclear weapons are not cannonballs; how many times could either country be destroyed?” Many of those, like Oppenheimer, who had the vision to perceive the ultimate futility of the arms race were blacklisted and/or persecuted. Rhodes asks a fundamental question: “If real political leaders understood from one end of the Cold War to the other that even one hydrogen bomb was sufficient deterrence, why did they allow the arms race to devour the wealth of the nation while it increased the risk of an accidental Armageddon?” The answer for both sides is essentially the power of the military-industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned: “Far more influential on the US side were such domestic political phenomena as competition among the military services, coalitions of scientific and industrial organizations promoting new technologies, the pressure of ‘defense’ as a political issue and defense spending to prime the economic pump, particularly in election years. Similar patterns obtained along somewhat different lines for the Soviet command economy.” Still, Rhodes ends on an optimistic note. While the world will not soon be free of nuclear weapons because they serve so many purposes, “as instruments of destruction, they have long been obsolete.” One can only hope that he’s right. But it’s been only just over three-quarters of a century since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This is a worthy sequel to the author's Pulitzer Prize winning `The Making of the Atomic Bomb.' It admirably relates the history of post-WW2 atomic weapons (including the Soviet program) and the development of the `Super' (hydrogen/thermonuclear) Bomb. Theoretical and technical challenges are clearly profiled with conceptual, developmental, and testing milestones. Not least, the political context (the Berlin Airlift, Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc) is also fully explored. Soviet espionage dating from the earliest efforts at Los Alamos is detailed (Harry Gold, Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, the Rosenburgs, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, the Cohens). It reveals a ruthless régime (Joseph Stalin and Lavrenti Beria), but also a parent country bled white by the loss of over twenty million in WW2 (and all the more susceptible to new threats). Though espionage no doubt accelerated Soviet progress, able scientists like Igor Kurchatov and Andrei Sakharov fulfilled Bohr's prediction that scientific progress was inevitable across the globe. Prometheus did not discriminate. Major figures (J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Stanislaw Ulam, Louis Strauss, Curtis LeMay, etc) are also depicted (with the increasingly divisive politics of their times). The testing of `Mike' 1 November 1952 at Eniwetok revealed a single bomb that yielded 10.4 megatons, more than twice the power of all explosives used in WW2. Subsequent improvements have increased the easy agency and disastrous yield of subsequent generations of this weapon. During the Cuban Missile Crisis SAC had 7,000 megatons in the air ready (and eager?) to strike the USSR. Does superiority in weapons of mass destruction (liable to kill us even if successfully deployed against an enemy) make us safer or less safe? Is it (as Oppenheimer predicted) a case of "scorpions in a bottle?" Read this account and decide for yourself.

President Franklin Delano Roosvelt was very smar and he could sense the technology rapid advancement , and he knew the isolationism policy has already become invalid , and president Roovelt after receiving Albert Einstein 's Letter , he immediately started the Manhattan Project .

Good comprehensive history narrated well

Some of the more negative reviews of this book are less than perceptive. Rhodes' earlier 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' is an extraordinary book, an exhilarating intellectual adventure that suddenly becomes what we had forgotten it was all along; an appalling human tragedy. The description of Little Boy's effect on the city and people of Hiroshima is some of the most powerful non-fiction writing I have ever read. The atomic scientists believed, almost up until the last minute, that they would be permitted a role in the decision to drop the bomb. When they weren't, it affected them in many different ways. This book is about those ways. The claim that Rhodes should have 'spared the politics' is idiotic. This book is the shadowy aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it's primarily about the slow construction of the nuclear state. The politics are an integral part of the story, and they are fascinating. Rhodes is very good about the Soviet bomb program, which relied heavily on nuclear secrets stolen from the Americans but which was still a pretty heroic effort. Stalin put secret police chief Lavrenti Beria in charge of it, which probably set them back a couple of years in that the brutal, scientifically illiterate and deeply paranoid Beria never had the slightest grasp of what the Soviet scientists were doing or even that radiation could be bad for you. (When Beria finally gets arrested and executed after Stalin's death, the reader almost breathes a sigh of relief.) Bad as Beria was, the most chilling character in the book is actually the man who set the US H-bomb program back years: Edward Teller. Teller is spoken of as a great scientist, but he seems to have been incapable of sustained work on any one problem, preferring to flit about from topic to topic and constantly urging the authorities to funnel manpower and resources into his own fundamentally flawed H-bomb design, the so-called 'Super'. The Super never would have worked (the first H-bomb, Ivy Mike, was based on a quite different design), but Teller never seems to have admitted it to himself. Instead, he blamed his old boss Robert Oppenheimer for the failure to realise his own unworkable scheme and when a conniving incompetent named William Borden started making false and damaging claims about Oppenheimer's political loyalty, Teller jumped on the bandwagon and made similar claims of his own. Oppenheimer was subjected to a gruelling and punitive security hearing and his security clearance was ultimately revoked, even though Rhodes finds it easy enough to demonstrate that Oppenheimer could never have been a Soviet spy. Teller is the book's real villain - a vengeful, bitter and unreliable human being who ended up with enormous influence and power. The eventual key to the design of the H-bomb was in fact the work of Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, but Teller refused to recognise Ulam's contribution and to his death he continued to claim sole credit, something which his fellow scientists quietly insist he did not deserve. In spite of having destroyed Oppenheimer's career, Teller had the insensitivity to go up to him and behave as if they were still friendly, which Oppenheimer found more baffling than insulting. William Borden was apparently a fairly typical bureaucratic hack with no special understanding of nuclear war; he believed it to be 'inevitable', which as the intervening sixty years have demonstrated is not necessarily the case. He and sometime Atomic Energy Commission member Lewis Strauss are the two other least likeable characters in the book, motivated more by personal dislike of Oppenheimer than by any real proof that he was politically disloyal. Curtis LeMay is a somewhat tragic figure. A personally brave and skilful commander in WW2, he came to be motivated by the humanly commendable but militarily dubious desire to not risk his own men in combat. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that any competent commander sometimes has to do just that. LeMay developed a theory of deterrence that came to encompass the necessity for preventive nuclear strikes; during the Cuban missile crisis, LeMay (at his blustering worst) urged Kennedy to let him nuke the USSR into oblivion and when Kennedy refused, he contemptuously wrote the President off as a coward. Kennedy may have been guilty of brinkmanship, but if he had listened to LeMay half the planet would now be a wasteland and the rest would be suffering from a nuclear winter. Men like Teller, Borden, Strauss and LeMay governed American nuclear policy for decades, which is one of the reasons why the US now has a colossal national debt. The Cold War ended the Soviet Union, but it also pushed the American economy to the edge on which it has been teetering for years, as well as shoving the mainstream of American politics grotesquely far to the right. 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' is, among other things, a book about how wise and good men did a very bad thing. 'Dark Sun' is (among other things) about how those men were systematically ignored by powerful men who were less wise, more suspicious, more vengeful, more terrified. It's about how the Cold War came to happen. If it's less fun than the previous book (which of course ceases to be fun the minute the first bomb falls on Hiroshima), it's because it had to be. You need to read them both. Everybody does, because we still have thermonuclear weapons and if our leaders wanted it enough, it could all happen all over again.

Well written und superbly researched. Gives deep inside put into historical perspective. In short: a must to read for the historically minded

Excellent book, well documented on the genesis of A and H bombs. The Making of the Atomic Bob by the same author is excellent too.