Dark Sun : The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

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. "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. In this work of history, science, and politics, 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. This book 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. This stalemate, the author makes clear, forced the superpowers to a 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 and U.S. sources From the Publisher: 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 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. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb tells the story of the H-bomb and reveals how it created a nuclear stalemate that lasted forty years. 100,000 first printing. $100,000 ad/promo. Tour. Tells the story of the making of the H-bomb and reveals how it created a nuclear stalemate that lasted forty years