Selected Product:
| Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
Paperback
Author: Richard Rhodes
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Release Date: 1996-08-06
ISBN-10: 0684824140
ISBN-13: 9780684824147
List Price: $18.95
Average Customer Rating:
  | |
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
ISBN-10: 0684813785
ISBN-13: 9780684813783
List Price:$20.00
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
ISBN-10: 0375726268
ISBN-13: 9780375726262
List Price:$18.95
Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (Vintage)
ISBN-10: 0375713948
ISBN-13: 9780375713941
List Price:$15.95
The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How To Build an Atomic Bomb
ISBN-10: 0520075765
ISBN-13: 9780520075764
List Price:$39.95
Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element
ISBN-10: 0309102960
ISBN-13: 9780309102964
List Price:$27.95
|
To use our price comparison to get the cheapest price, please click on the "Find the Cheapest Price" button located above for Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes (ISBN-10: 0684824140, ISBN-13: 9780684824147).
At this time we have not yet written a review for Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes (ISBN-10: 0684824140, ISBN-13: 9780684824147). Please continue to keep checking back to this page as we are constantly adding reviews.
Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
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.
Mega Research
| Customer Rating: | This book has been roundly condemned for various reasons: Too much politics, personalities, science, history, spying, too liberal, too conservative, etc. Overall, the author achieved his goals rather successfully - telling the story of the era, the people, the events and the scientific breakthroughs that finally produced a thermonuclear weapon (and perhaps prevented an atomic war). Of course, we must travel through the history of the atomic bomb as well, since it preceded the H-bomb by a few years. The scientists continue to fascinate with their genius, ingenuity and drive. Politicians appeared much more human and caring than is generally assumed.
One area that still surprises was the widespread sympathy for the USSR. Why would "intellectuals" be attracted to a barbarian regime that killed tens of millions, used slave labor as state policy and retained power through torture and violence? What possible allure could a destitute land without freedom have? As an aside, in 1992 we were in Russia and frequently heard scorn against "Western idiots" who seriously believed the Soviet leaders or Marxism. The spies, of course, provided the Soviets a huge advantage on their own program, particularly theoretical aspects.
Politics played a heavy hand. Curtis LeMay was Svengali. Through his relentless drive for SAC readiness, he probably prevented the overrun of Europe by the Soviets but his desire for a military victory caused him to go beyond his orders (which were unclear at the time). Truman comes off as a troubled soul who contemplated his every action. It is, however, the scientists - their ideas, emotions, infighting and genius - that hold center stage. THe book is for the well-informed layman, preferably someone with a Physics course under their belt. The author offers some astute observations at the end but the reader realizes that many of these are in hindsight. My Grade - A- |
Personal dread as national policy
| Customer Rating: | Rhode's history of thermonuclear weaponry is well written, but the subject seems oddly dated, as if the "Cold War" and the terrors of atomic attack were something from centuries ago, not from my lifetime. The fear, dread, paranoia, and hysteria were very real and very recent, and it is only surely by the restraining hand of God in human history that it continues. Or, as Rhodes concludes, the greatest and only effective deterrent against nuclear war was "personal dread."
This abject and groveling fear in its own way changed history, shaping national policy during the Berlin crisis, the Cuban Missile crisis, in Southeast Asia, and 100 other small places. It made otherwise rational leaders envision and propose a plan to hide nuclear-tipped missiles in train cars and shuttle them continuously around the US--a plan that was proposed in my adult life time (late 70s and early 80s), and seemed positively Gothic (seemingly impossible, yet substantially real) in its horrific nature when I confronted it 20 years later in the display of one of the railroad cars and disarmed missiles in the museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. "Personal dread" indeed. |
Teller's story
| Customer Rating: | | Book arrived in good time. Monster of a book and will take a long read. Too bad summer is over. |
excellent work of history
| Customer Rating: | | I have read his Making of the Atomic Bomb, and enjoyed it. This book promises to be just as good and it is. Thanks to Richard Rhodes for making history a good book to read.Recommended |
A Dark Sun and a Cold War...
| Customer Rating: | Richard Rhodes' 1995 "Dark Sun" is the well-written and provocative sequel to his Pulizter Prize-winning "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." "Dark Sun", with some overlap, picks up the story with intertwined narratives about the making of the thermonuclear bomb, the espionage that allowed the Soviets to keep pace, and the Cold War atmosphere in which it all took place. One need not agree with all of Rhodes' conclusions to appreciate the depth of his research and the span of his narrative.
Following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of the Second World War, the American scientific and policy communities were split over the necessity for the follow-on development of a hydrogen bomb. Many of the original Manhatten Project scientists were shocked by the results of the atomic bomb and could scarcely conceive that a more destructive weapon might be useful. The result would be painful infighting, not least between Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, the leading scientific advocates against and for the hydrogen bomb.
For U.S. policy-makers, the fragile wartime alliance with the Soviet Union was already in tatters. Russia's brutal imposition of communist rule in Eastern Europe, its paranoid security policies, and its own rapid bomb development program put the Truman Administration in the political bind of having to compete with the Soviet Union whether it wanted to or not.
Rhodes does an excellent job tracing the Soviet nuclear weapons program through the efforts of its leading scientists, every bit the equal of their western counterparts and materially aided by their secret knowledge of the work that had already been accomplished in the Manhatten Project. Soviet espionage inside the U.S. and British nuclear programs saved years of work, enabling the Russians to field an atomic bomb by 1949 and a hydrogen bomb by 1955, much faster than predicted.
Rhodes' view of the subsequent arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the state of nuclear deterrence that was its outcome, is dark and pessimistic. In his undoubted horror at what might have happened, he rather fails to give credit to policy-makers for what did not happen, a nuclear exchange. Rhodes' claim that a more peaceful alternative history to the Cold War was prevented by aggressive US post-war policy is not confirmed by much of Cold War scholarship since 1995. Nevertheless, "Dark Sun" is highly recommended to students of the Cold War, not least for its clear lay-person explanation of the possibilities of the hydrogen bomb. |
|
