Dark Sun The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb, Richard Rhodes 1995, HC DJ ~Signed ~

Description: In this brilliant, riveting, major 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 stale-mate, 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—revela-tions based on previously undisclosed Soviet as well as US sources: • The first Soviet atomic bomb was a carbon copy of the first US atomic bomb, its plans supplied by wholesale Soviet espionage. • Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were Soviet agents. • In April 1947, in the heat of the burgeoning Cold War, the US had no assembled atomic bombs in stock. • The Soviet Union was essentially defenseless against atomic bombing until at least 1960. • Building the Strategic Air Command, Curtis LeMay made persistent attempts to acquire control of US nuclear weapons independent of presidential authorization. • SAC flew daily intelligence missions over the Soviet Union throughout the 1950s, including deliberately provocative overflights of Soviet cities by squadrons of aircraft in broad daylight. • At the height of the atomic bombs for General Douglas MacArthur's head. • US firebombing of North Korean cities and large dams killed more than two million civilians. • Dark Sun offers the first detailed description from authoritative sources of the engineering design of the first US hydrogen bomb. • The first test of a US hydrogen bomb fueled with lithium deuteride (Castle Bravo at Bikini, March 1954) ran away to three times its predicted yield. • Not Robert Oppenheimer, as he was accused, but physicist and superhawk Edward Teller delayed the development of the hydrogen bomb; but for Teller's obsession with megaton yields, the US could have tested a half-megaton thermonuclear by 1949. • During the Cuban missile crisis, SAC put 7,000 megatons into the air, menaced the Soviet Union with an unauthorized missile launch and deliberately flew bombers toward Soviet targets. The first and only direct nuclear confrontation between the superpowers was also very nearly the last. In this enthralling, majestic book, which follows the lives of the atomic scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the author of the classic work on the atomic bomb now lays bare the secret heart of the Cold War—and shows why the world wars that devastated the first half of the century can never happen again. Thank you for looking at our listing. A purchase is supporting Friends of Spanish Peaks Library District! These books are all donated from different sources. This book is in very good condition, ~SIGNED~ and an ex-library book with library stamps and markings, see photos for details. I will combine shipping for each additional item purchased. Please do not pay for books until you are done bidding/shopping, and I will create a new Invoice with the reduced shipping charges. Please, please, I cannot issue refunds due to penalties that EBay assesses. Feel free to submit any questions you have. Thanks!

Price: 30 USD

Location: Walsenburg, Colorado

End Time: 2024-11-28T00:21:09.000Z

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