Dark Sun: Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (Sloan Technology Series) [Hardcover]

Rhodes' earlier "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" won a Pulitzer prize; I thought this was even better. The first part is an account of Soviet espionage into the Manhattan project; Rhodes lets us in on all the mundane details while allowing the inherent drama to come through in full force.

The second part was even more of a revelation: I never thought the nature of the "technically sweet" innovation that saved the
H-bomb project would be revealed to the public during my lifetime, but it's spelled out here. I also never thought I'd understand in detail how an H-bomb works, but Rhodes makes it both comprehensible and fascinating.

Chapter 24 is the heart of the book--a description of the Mike shot, the world's first thermonuclear explosion. Don't start reading it if you have to go somewhere soon. A classic case of "I couldn't put it down".

Some of the more negative reviews of this book are less than perceptive. Rhodes' earlier 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' is an extraordinary book, an exhilarating intellectual adventure that suddenly becomes what we had forgotten it was all along; an appalling human tragedy. The description of Little Boy's effect on the city and people of Hiroshima is some of the most powerful non-fiction writing I have ever read. The atomic scientists believed, almost up until the last minute, that they would be permitted a role in the decision to drop the bomb. When they weren't, it affected them in many different ways. This book is about those ways.

The claim that Rhodes should have 'spared the politics' is idiotic. This book is the shadowy aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it's primarily about the slow construction of the nuclear state. The politics are an integral part of the story, and they are fascinating. Rhodes is very good about the Soviet bomb program, which relied heavily on nuclear secrets stolen from the Americans but which was still a pretty heroic effort. Stalin put secret police chief Lavrenti Beria in charge of it, which probably set them back a couple of years in that the brutal, scientifically illiterate and deeply paranoid Beria never had the slightest grasp of what the Soviet scientists were doing or even that radiation could be bad for you. (When Beria finally gets arrested and executed after Stalin's death, the reader almost breathes a sigh of relief.)

Bad as Beria was, the most chilling character in the book is actually the man who set the US H-bomb program back years: Edward Teller. Teller is spoken of as a great scientist, but he seems to have been incapable of sustained work on any one problem, preferring to flit about from topic to topic and constantly urging the authorities to funnel manpower and resources into his own fundamentally flawed H-bomb design, the so-called 'Super'. The Super never would have worked (the first H-bomb, Ivy Mike, was based on a quite different design), but Teller never seems to have admitted it to himself. Instead, he blamed his old boss Robert Oppenheimer for the failure to realise his own unworkable scheme and when a conniving incompetent named William Borden started making false and damaging claims about Oppenheimer's political loyalty, Teller jumped on the bandwagon and made similar claims of his own. Oppenheimer was subjected to a gruelling and punitive security hearing and his security clearance was ultimately revoked, even though Rhodes finds it easy enough to demonstrate that Oppenheimer could never have been a Soviet spy.

Teller is the book's real villain - a vengeful, bitter and unreliable human being who ended up with enormous influence and power. The eventual key to the design of the H-bomb was in fact the work of Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, but Teller refused to recognise Ulam's contribution and to his death he continued to claim sole credit, something which his fellow scientists quietly insist he did not deserve. In spite of having destroyed Oppenheimer's career, Teller had the insensitivity to go up to him and behave as if they were still friendly, which Oppenheimer found more baffling than insulting.

William Borden was apparently a fairly typical bureaucratic hack with no special understanding of nuclear war; he believed it to be 'inevitable', which as the intervening sixty years have demonstrated is not necessarily the case. He and sometime Atomic Energy Commission member Lewis Strauss are the two other least likeable characters in the book, motivated more by personal dislike of Oppenheimer than by any real proof that he was politically disloyal.

Curtis LeMay is a somewhat tragic figure. A personally brave and skilful commander in WW2, he came to be motivated by the humanly commendable but militarily dubious desire to not risk his own men in combat. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that any competent commander sometimes has to do just that. LeMay developed a theory of deterrence that came to encompass the necessity for preventive nuclear strikes; during the Cuban missile crisis, LeMay (at his blustering worst) urged Kennedy to let him nuke the USSR into oblivion and when Kennedy refused, he contemptuously wrote the President off as a coward. Kennedy may have been guilty of brinkmanship, but if he had listened to LeMay half the planet would now be a wasteland and the rest would be suffering from a nuclear winter.

Men like Teller, Borden, Strauss and LeMay governed American nuclear policy for decades, which is one of the reasons why the US now has a colossal national debt. The Cold War ended the Soviet Union, but it also pushed the American economy to the edge on which it has been teetering for years, as well as shoving the mainstream of American politics grotesquely far to the right.

'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' is, among other things, a book about how wise and good men did a very bad thing. 'Dark Sun' is (among other things) about how those men were systematically ignored by powerful men who were less wise, more suspicious, more vengeful, more terrified. It's about how the Cold War came to happen. If it's less fun than the previous book (which of course ceases to be fun the minute the first bomb falls on Hiroshima), it's because it had to be. You need to read them both. Everybody does, because we still have thermonuclear weapons and if our leaders wanted it enough, it could all happen all over again.

This book succeeds in being many things to many people. It is a spy novel, as we follow the espionage twists and turns during the Manhattan Project. It is horror story, as chilling as any Hammer movie; we are told just how close the world came close to oblivion, before the Cuban missile crisis brought men to their senses. And it is a scientific exposition, in relative layman's terms, of how the physicists discovered the secret of the thermonuclear. Richard Rhodes' narrative keeps even technophobes hooked. The descriptions of how H-bomb tests exceeded even the anticipated yields are particularly chilling.