Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

by Richard Rhodes Narrated by Not Yet Available

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Rhodes epic history of the hydrogen bomb and the Cold War arms race spent two weeks on PW's bestseller list. (Aug.)

Library Journal

Like Rhodes's earlier The Making of the Atomic Bomb (LJ 3/1/87), this meticulously documented treatise presents a gripping story as it provides parallel coverage of U.S. and Russian efforts to create the hydrogen bomb, resulting in the nuclear arms race. Using declassified U.S. material and recently released KGB espionage documents, Rhodes provides a clear picture of U.S. research efforts from the late 1940s through the early 1950s and the nearly direct transfer of these results to the major Soviet research establishments through the efforts of Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, and many others. Even more fascinating is Rhodes's treatment of the role of the Strategic Air Command in the military mentality of the 1960s. With the conclusion of the Cold War, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the current American concern about downsizing the military, there is much in this book worth serious consideration. Recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/95; see also "The Bombs of August," LJ 7/95, p. 98-100.-Ed.]-Hilary D. Burton, Lawrence Livermore National Lab., Livermore, Cal.

From the Publisher

"A dark tale told with gripping intensity....Chilling and brilliant. [The] authoritative and riveting sequel to [the] Pulitzer Prize-winning saga The Making of the Atomic Bomb."–Marcia Bartusiak, The Washington Post Book World

"Rhodes is a meticulous scholar, yet his tale is as riveting as any suspense thriller, replete with fascinating and bizarre characters, exotic locales, and a cliff-hanging plot. And all of it is true."–Paul Preuss, San Jose Mercury News

"A book of formidable range...draws on a vast array of sources, melding previous scholarship with an abundance of fresh material....Rhodes writes with a sharp eye for anecdote, character and political context....The result is a brilliantly rich and vivid account of the Cold War."–Daniel J. Kevles, The New York Times Book Review

"This most rewarding book is unique in the grim grandeur of its scope, the richness and originality of its content, and its deep and humane understanding."–Loma Arnold, Nature

"[Dark Sun] demonstrates the same ambition; literary skill; unrelenting research; talent for portraiture; understanding of the links between science, war and politics; willingness to stand up to large historical questions; and sound judgment that distinguished Richard Rhodes's 1988 book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. But this is the more important volume, not only because of its influence on the way we think about a half-century of world history, but because the hydrogen bomb continues to cast a shadow on the world today."–Michael Beschloss, Los Angeles Times

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192491041
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	11/26/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

'A Smell of Nuclear Powder'

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. Bombarding uranium with neutrons, French physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie wrote his Leningrad colleague Abram Fedorovich Ioffe, caused that heaviest of natural elements to disintegrate into two or more fragments that repelled each other with prodigious energy. It was fitting that the first report of a discovery that would challenge the dominant political system of the world should reach the Soviet Union from France, a nation to which Czarist Russia had looked for culture and technology. Joliot-Curie's letter to the grand old man of Russian physics "got a frenzied going-over" in a seminar at Ioffe's institute in Leningrad, a protégé of one of the participants reports. "The first communications about the discovery of fission...astounded us," Soviet physicist Georgi Flerov remembered in old age. "...There was a smell of nuclear powder in the air."

Reports in the British scientific journal Nature soon confirmed the German discovery and research on nuclear fission started up everywhere. The news fell on fertile ground in the Soviet Union. Russian interest in radioactivity extended back to the time of its discovery at the turn of the century. Vladimir I. Vernadski, a Russian mineralogist, told the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1910 that radioactivity opened up "new sources of atomic energy...exceeding by millions of times all the sources of energy that the human imaginationhas envisaged." Academy geologists located a rich vein of uranium ore in the Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan in 1910; a private company mined pitchblende there at Tiuia-Muiun ("Camel's Neck") until 1914. After the First World War, the Red Army seized the residues of the company's extraction of uranium and vanadium. The residues contained valuable radium, which transmutes naturally from uranium by radioactive decay. The Soviet radiochemist Vitali Grigorievich Khlopin extracted several grams of radium for medical use in 1921.

There were only about a thousand physicists in the world in 1895. Work in the new scientific discipline was centered in Western Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. A number of Russian scientists studied there. Abram Ioffe's career preparation included research in Germany with Nobel laureate Wilhelm Roentgen, the discoverer of X rays; Vernadski worked at the Curie Institute in Paris. The outstanding Viennese theoretical physicist Paul Ehrenfest taught in St. Petersburg for five years before the First World War. In 1918, in the midst of the Russian Revolution, Ioffe founded a new Institute of Physics and Technology in Petrograd. Despite difficult conditions -- the chemist N. N. Semenov describes "hunger and ruin everywhere, no instruments or equipment" as late as 1921 -- "Fiztekh" quickly became a national center for physics research. "The Institute was the most attractive place of employment for all the young scientists looking to contribute to the new physics," Soviet physicist Sergei E. Frish recalls. "...Ioffe was known for his up-to-date ideas and tolerant views. He willingly took on, as staff members, beginning physicists whom he judged talented....Dedication to science was all that mattered to him." The crew Ioffe assembled was so young and eager that older hands nicknamed Fiztekh "the kindergarten."

During its first decade, Fiztekh specialized in the study of high-voltage electrical effects, practical research to support the new Communist state's drive for national electrification -- the success of socialism, Lenin had proclaimed more than once, would come through electrical power. After 1928, having ousted his rivals and consolidated his rule, Josef Stalin promulgated the first of a brutal series of Five-Year Plans that set ragged peasants on short rations building monumental hydroelectric clams to harness Russia's wild rivers. "Stalin's realism was harsh and unillusioned," comments C. P. Snow. "He said, after the first two years of industrialization, when people were pleading with him to go slower because the country couldn't stand it:

To slacken the pace would mean to lag behind; and those who lag behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten. No, we don't want to be. Old Russia was ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans, she was beaten by Turkish beys, she was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords, she was beaten by Polish-Lithuanian pans, she was beaten by Anglo-French capitalists, she was beaten by Japanese barons, she was beaten by all -- for her backwardness. For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. She was beaten because to beat her was profitable and went unpunished. You remember the words of the pre-revolutionary poet: "Thou art poor and thou art plentiful, thou art mighty, and thou art helpless, Mother Russia."

We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good the lag in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.

Soviet scientists felt a special burden of responsibility in the midst of such desperate struggle; the heat and light that radioactive materials such as radium generate for centuries without stint mocked their positions of privilege. Vernadski, who founded the State Radium Institute in Petrograd in 1922, wrote hopefully that year that "it will not be long before man will receive atomic energy for his disposal, a source of energy which will make it possible for him to build his life as he pleases." World leaders such as England's Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the atomic nucleus, and Albert Einstein, who quantified the energy latent in matter in his formula E = mc², disputed such optimistic assessments. The nuclei of atoms held latent far more energy than all the falling water of the world, but the benchtop processes then known for releasing it consumed much more energy than they produced. Fiztekh had spun off provincial institutes in 1931, most notably at Kharkov and Sverdlovsk; in 1932, when the discovery of the neutron and of artificial radioactivity increased the pace of research into the secrets of the atomic nucleus, Ioffe decided to divert part of Fiztekh's effort specifically to nuclear physics. The government shared his enthusiasm. "I went to Sergei Ordzhonikidze," Ioffe wrote many years later, "who was chairman of the Supreme Council of National Economy, put the matter before him, and in literally ten minutes left his office with an order signed by him to assign the sum I had requested to the Institute."

To direct the new program, Ioffe chose Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov, an exceptional twenty-nine-year-old physicist, the son of a surveyor and a teacher, born in the pine-forested Chelyabinsk region of the southern Urals in 1903. Kurchatov was young for the job, but he was a natural leader, vigorous and self-confident. One of his contemporaries, Anatoli P. Alexandrov, remembers his characteristic tenacity:

I was always struck by his great sense of responsibility, for whatever problem he was working on, whatever its dimensions may have been. A lot of us, after all, take a careless, haphazard attitude toward many aspects of life that seem secondary to us. There wasn't a bit of that attitude in Igor vasilievich....[He] would sink his teeth into us and drink our blood until we'd fulfilled [our obligations]. At the same time, there was nothing pedantic about him. He would throw himself into things with such evident joy and conviction that finally we, too, would get caught up in his energetic style....

We'd already nicknamed him "General."...

Within a year, justi