Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb,   ISBN:9780684824147

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The book, Dark Sun - The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb, by Richard Rhodes gives a history of the making of the first atomic weapons. The book covers a span of time from 1939, just prior to World War I, up to the late 1950's. Rhodes shows us how U.S. politics played an important role in speeding up the research of the bomb, both fission and fusion, by providing large amounts of money for equipment, materials, facilities, and scientific personnel. The science, technology, and problems encountered in the design and manufacture of atomic weapons and nuclear reactors are covered and examples are kept simple enough for the non-scientist (like me) to understand. Perhaps the most important topic of the book was the controversy surrounding the creation of such a powerful bomb, and the costly Cold War arms race that it started between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which lasted for fifty years.
This book relies upon a variety of sources to back up its arguments. For example, the Cold War arms race actually began during WWII when Russian spies began infiltrating the United States, and other countries, in an effort to gain information to build atomic weapons. The main supporting document for this spy activity was given by the Soviet intelligence agency called the KGB, and published in a Russian journal Problems in the History of Science and Technology. Rhodes uses this journal, confessions from Russian spies (Klaus Fuch, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and others,) FBI records, and decoded wartime cable intercepts, to fill in a timeline of espionage events. Rhodes also used a declassified diary of the commanding general of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC), Curtis LeMay, another important character of the Cold War, to show us how power hungry and dangerous he was. As SAC commander, he wanted the ability to control and launch U.S. nuclear weapons and recommended we bomb Korea (during the Korean War) or Russia if need be. Atomic weapon information was obtained from declassified documents. A hydrogen bomb called Mike, tested in1952, is shown cut-in-half, on page 506 in Dark Sun, it is a simple explanation of how the H-bomb works. Also included in the book are a variety of black and white pictures of scientists, politicians, and military commanders and of the bombs themselves (before and during detonation.)
Overall, the book was scary. It's hard for me to imagine the destructive power of an atomic weapon, and harder still to imagine the heavy price that Japanese citizens paid when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I thought it was very wrong and also extremely sad that nations, like the U.S. and Russia, would spend so much money, time, and effort on the development of nuclear weapons. Rhodes explains that the arms race debt eventually caused the collapse of the Soviet Union and the U.S. to end up with a four trillion dollar deficit - imagine all the other things that money might have been used for! What was most terrifying to me was the story about Curtis Lemay, the commanding general of SAC, and how he used his persuasive power to get atomic bombs to Guam, and have these bombs placed under his command, so that he might use them upon Korea. The most confusing thing about the book for me, was the number of scientists, spies, and government and military officials - there were too many to keep track of and I thought it might have been helpful to have a diagram showing how people were connected to each other.
This book does a good job of explaining the history of the atomic bomb. It is interesting, and scary. I believe its main focus is to show us how dangerous and un-winnable a nuclear war is, and I think it hits the target.

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A must read. Gives insight into a period that we seem not to have remembered. Full of technical history of how to build nuclear weapons.

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I read the making of the atomic bomb by the same author and remianed fascinated for 800 pages. This book is equally marvelous. The previous book dealt with the advances in science and the people who made them, beginning in the 19th century. The hydrogen bomb was conceived during the epoch subsequent to the making of the atomic bomb and its promoter, Edward Teller, was not a popular person at the time; he encountered resistence. The author describes the personalities who were working on these weapons, famous scientists, and their quirks and weaknesses. Also, all of the science that goes on. I did stop to study a bit.

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Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
Very engrossing and difficult to put down after you have started to read it. The book describes in sufficient detail the difficulties in developing the atom and hydrogen bomb in American and its allies as well as the Russian effort and the espionage efforts involved by the Russians.
The book leaves no doubt as to the damage caused by those involved with the espionage effort.

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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.