Richard Rhodes tells the story of the H-bomb and reveals how it created a nuclear stalemate that lasted forty years. He 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 20th century science and technology, became the defining issue in the Cold War; and reveals how close the world came to nuclear destruction before the USA and the former Soviet Union learned the lesson of nuclear stalemate - a stalemate, Rhodes makes clear, that forced to 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 Angle-American atomic-bomb research arrived in Moscow via Soviet espionage to the week of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Curtis LeMay goaded President John F 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.
Dimensions:165 x 246
Author: Richard Rhodes
ISBN: 9780684804002
Format: Hardcover
Pages 731