Dark sun : the making of the hydrogen bomb /

Includes bibliographical references (pages 689-703) and index.

Prologue: Deliveries. -- pt. 1. A choice between worlds. 'A smell of nuclear powder' ; Diffusion ; 'Material of immense value' ; A Russian connection ; 'Super lend-lease' ; Rendezvous ; 'Mass production' ; Explosions ; 'Provide the bomb' ; A pretty good description. -- pt. 2. New weapons added to the arsenals. Transitions ; Peculiar sovereignties ; Changing history ; F-1 ; Modus Vivendi ; Sailing near the wind ; Getting down to business ; 'This Buck Rogers universe' ; First lightning ; 'Gung-ho for the super' -- pt. 3. Scorpions in a bottle. Fresh horrors ; Lessons of limited war ; Hydrodynamic lenses and radiation mirrors ; Mike ; Powers of retaliation ; In the matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer ; Scorpions in a bottle. -- Epilogue: 'The gradual removal of prejudices'

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.