Dark Sun - BookWyrm.de

Hardcover, 736 Seiten

Sprache: English

Am 1. August 1995 von Simon & Schuster veröffentlicht.

ISBN:: 978-0-684-80400-2
OCLC-Nummer:: 32509950

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 …

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.

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technicat@bookwyrm.social hat Dark Sun von Richard Rhodes besprochen (Sloan technology series)

a mixture of scientists gone wild, regretful spies, and creepy generals who wanted to see mushroom clouds

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An exhaustive, and exhausting, recounting of the development of the hydrogen bomb, although really most of it was about the making of the preceding fission bomb - the Manhattan Project and the parallel Soviet research+espionage project. The result reads like a spy novel interleaved with technical explanations of how the things worked and scientist drama (would have made a great reality show, not a phrase I use often). I really felt for the Soviet scientists who were literally under the gun to produce results, and it's a testament to the writing that I found myself rooting for the various bombs. The real story though, taking the rest of the book up to the Cuban missile crisis, is the insane accumulation of these weapons and the eagerness of many, including key military people in charge of those weapons, not just to contemplate but to go ahead and start a nuclear war. …

An exhaustive, and exhausting, recounting of the development of the hydrogen bomb, although really most of it was about the making of the preceding fission bomb - the Manhattan Project and the parallel Soviet research+espionage project. The result reads like a spy novel interleaved with technical explanations of how the things worked and scientist drama (would have made a great reality show, not a phrase I use often). I really felt for the Soviet scientists who were literally under the gun to produce results, and it's a testament to the writing that I found myself rooting for the various bombs. The real story though, taking the rest of the book up to the Cuban missile crisis, is the insane accumulation of these weapons and the eagerness of many, including key military people in charge of those weapons, not just to contemplate but to go ahead and start a nuclear war. It's a miracle we're not mutants wandering the radioactive wastelands.

Themen

Ordnance, weapons technology
Science: General Issues
Politics/International Relations
Nuclear Weapons
History - General History
History
Military Science
Modern - 20th Century/Nuclear Age
History / General
Hydrogen bomb