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 enlarge | Author: Richard Rhodes
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $18.95
Buy Used: $2.83
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Avg. Customer Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 26515
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 736
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.4
ISBN: 0684824140
Dewey Decimal Number: 623.45119
EAN: 9780684824147
ASIN: 0684824140
Publication Date: August 6, 1996
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Condition: Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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| Customer Reviews:
 Very disappointing; where was the story of the H-bomb? August 17, 2006
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
The title of this book is a misnomer as there is very little about the making of the hydrogen bomb in it. I can't remember the last time I was this disappointed in a book. There are hundreds of pages spent detailing the Soviet spy program during WWII while the USA was trying to build the atomic bomb. The scientists and their contacts and where they met and what they said to each other and what the Soviet scientists did with the information and on and on in mind-numbing minutiae. This information is all well and good, but that's not why I bought the book. The hydrogen bomb isn't touched on for 350 or 400 pages and then it still seems to spend more time on the Soviets and their attempts to catch up to the American program.
The writing is fine, if not stimulating, it just seems to be off track most of the time. I wanted to read about Teller, Oppenheimer, Ulam, Feynman and all the rest and their conversations, disagreements, failures and ultimate successes in creating the hydrogen bomb. What I got was a heavy dose of Klaus Fuchs and the rest who stole every item they could and sold it to the Russians. This is an important story, but it's not the one I wanted to read about and not the story the book purported to tell.
THREE DIFFERENT STORIES IN ONE April 2, 2006
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
While I did not agree with many of the author's opinions and analyses, I must say 'Dark Sun' was a fairly enjoyable read. Rhodes really tells it as three different stories in one volume: a story of science, a story of espionage, and one of cold war history.
The scientific history traces the making of the bomb itself and culminates with the sucessful test of the first bomb by the US in 1952; a blast which turned out to be far larger than expected. I am not very technical, so I can't vouch for accuracy here, but the explanations were about as clear as can be given to the non-expert.
The espionage history begins in WWII itself and concludes with the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953. Rhodes sides with many others in finding the executions unfair, but it seems to me that those who give secrets to foreign agents deserve what they get. The spies should not get off the hook because the Soviets were allies during the war. Stalin's Russia was committed to our destruction and so could never be considered a true ally, and the prosecuters were right that commuting the sentence would send the wrong message to the Soviets - that we were too weak to even execute known spies.
The third part of this book covers the cold war during the period. We learn how tensions from the Berlin blockade to China and then Korea accelerated the race for a super bomb. Neither side wished for war, but felt one was perhaps inevitable.
Rhodes does not like Teller or the hydrogen bomb and believes the project was unnecessary, as we had plenty of A-bombs. But would it have helped our image or sense of security had the Russians got the super first? Would US restraint have stopped the Soviets? I doubt it. Truman was right to approve the plan quickly and override the scientists' objections. The hydrogen bomb was inevitable.
Necessary Differences of Style January 10, 2006
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" is my favorite nonfiction book. I hesitated to read this one for several years only because of reviews that slammed the book for dwelling too much on Soviet espionage and atomic bomb development and not enough on the actual physics of thermonuclear weapons design.
The criticism is accurate inasmuch as this book is much less about physics than its predecessor. "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" took the reader through the major breakthroughs of atomic physics, the relationships between the most influential scientists of the twentieth century, and finally how all of these brilliant individuals influenced, directly or indirectly, the Manhattan Engineering Dist. and allied atomic bomb research.
The story of Dark Sun is much different. "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" told the story of scientists and nations coming together to defeat the Axis powers. "Dark Sun" tells the story of how weapons of mass destruction polarized scientists, nations, military sects, and political mindsets (Edward Teller and E.O. Lawrences pro-thermonuclear detterence and Oppenheimer's international control camps, Soviets vs. Western powers, etc.).
It is this polarization that is the primary concern of Rhodes. Having covered the issue of nuclear fission in his previous book, all that is left scientifically is the fusion of the light elements, the use of radiation implosion, and some other admittedly difficult engineering breakthroughs necessary to sustain a thermonuclear reaction. The result was merely to boost weapons already designed for mass industrial bombing to even more terrifying megaton proportions.
Faced with the fact that after the war Los Alamos ceased to be a barracks of every influential scientific mind in the United States and became a sort of post-war arms race machine, Rhodes takes the emphasis off the scientists and puts it onto the socio-political mindset that leads to the idea of detterence, of keeping a peace-time nuclear arsenal of tremendous strength, of treating a former wartime ally as a deadly threat.
So while the focus of the book is different, I feel that it was different, not so much in a way that makes "Dark Sun" more interesting than "Making the Atomic Bomb", but in a way that was necessary and makes for perhaps a more historically relevent read. Rhodes analysis is top notch and the espionage reading is actually quite interesting, particualy as it disrobes the kind of sophisticated James Bond style clandestine operative most people continue to associate with spy-work.
I feel this book is an essential follow-up to "Making the Atomic Bomb".
 gripping history read October 27, 2005
26 out of 26 found this review helpful
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb is a fascinating historical work that reads almost like a novel; perhaps a particularly technical Clancy novel, but a novel nevertheless. It targets a general audience and balances the consequent need for clarity with depth and technical detail, and with great success.
Rhodes starts by taking us through America's Manhattan Project, a subject he dealt with in depth in his earlier book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. This time he focuses on the political elements of the project and with Soviet espionage. Klaus Fuchs is a major character in Dark Sun; in TMAB, which deals in much more depth with the scientific and technical problems behind atom bomb development, Fuchs has only a minor role. Here the scene switches back and forth between the U.S. and the USSR, where Igor Kurchatov takes charge of the Soviet nuclear program under secret police head Lavrenti Beria.
The early focus on espionage and Soviet work is important in this book; the subtitle, The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, refers to the political impetus behind the bomb, not the scientific and technical issues. There were formidable technical difficulties in the design of the first hydrogen bomb, but nothing that would warrant the same in-depth examination of basic science that appears in the earlier book. It becomes clear in the course of Dark Sun that the making of thermonuclear weapons was driven by politics, not military need or science (not to minimize the role of politics in atomic bomb development, but that was also the result of extravagantly brilliant scientists pursuing basic and often unexpected research in physics). And much of that political impetus was the result of American shock that the Soviets detonated an atomic bomb as soon as they did, years sooner than American scientists and policy makers believed that they could. Hence the importance of Fuchs and Beria.
Also prominent in this book is Edward Teller. His obsession with thermonuclear weapons seems a powerful force behind American policy development. It's always seemed to me that Ulam was as much the father of the hydrogen bomb as Teller, but Rhodes convinces me that Teller deserves that sobriquet on the basis of his political efforts more than on the basis of his technical efforts. As the making of the atomic bomb was the result of extraordinary scientific and technical achievement, the making of the hydrogen bomb was the result of extraordinary political will. Much of that will was Teller's.
That will was also destructive. The book closes with an examination of the fallout from obsession with the Soviet threat and the way that bomb research was pursued in this country. I think that Rhodes overestimates the costs of the nuclear arms race by misallocating them, and he draws too strong a link between thermonuclear research and America's fraying infrastructure. He also gives short shrift to the case that our obsession with the Soviet threat was almost inevitable and necessary given Soviet behavior and the opacity of their motives at the time. I think Rhodes' treatment of Teller betrays a certain bias. If there's a villain in this book it isn't Fuchs, but Teller. Teller's role in the destruction of Oppenheimer wasn't meaningless and it wasn't an episode of which he should be proud, but Teller wasn't the devil. He was a man motivated by fear, and it was a fear of forces and events he didn't create. Teller was even less responsible for the cold war than he was the scientific father of the hydrogen bomb. I think Rhodes could have found a better villain.
In the context of the book I think these objections are small points; putting them aside, I think this book is very good.
US H-bomb Development History October 7, 2005
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is an absolutely mind-boggling detailed book about the history of the developement of US Hydrogen bomb.
Richard Rhodes has done a fantastic job walking the reader through the semi-technical descriptions of the original implosion-type atomic bomb to the first "proof of principle" demonstration of "radiation-imploded" H-bomb in 1952.
The technical information is accurate and authoritative. Rhodes seems to have had access both to US sources, particularly US veterans of Los Alamos who could not keep their mouth shut when it came to classified descriptions of the Mike device, their oath of secrecy not whitstanding, and equally the ex-KGB spies and the Soviet Arzamas-16 veterans.
For some reason, the people with the "secrets" can't resist the entreaties of journalists and authors in spilling the beans...and the author has no compunction whatsoever in using classified information directly in the book...
So, here you have it:
A detailed description of the "Fat Man" Plutonium bomb from the KGB archives, together with a cross-section photo from a 1951 Klaus Fuchs confession to the FBI
A detailed description and operation of the Mike H-bomb proof of principle, more accurate than the Howard Morland of Progressive fame, since it came out of the mouth of Los Alamos retired participants...the only thing missing are the dimmensions!
As far as history, Rhodes traces the H-bomb developement from the 1941 Fermi-Teller casual conversation to the various iterations, false starts, and side-shows, from the original "Classical Super" to "Alarm Clock/Sloika", to "Booster", to the Greenhouse "Cylinder" to "Equilibrium Thermonuclear".
Rhodes description of the actual "discovery" of the secret to a true H-bomb is still not settled because of partisanship coloring his perspective.
The three secrets, the staging, compression by radiation implosion, and spark plug ignition, are given short shrift by using generally negative comments from ex-Los Alamos participants, that it was "obvious to anybody analyzing the output of a fission bomb"...To an external observer, it sounds more like sour grapes...
The reasonable conjecture by students of history is that S. Ulam came up with the concept of staging , and E. Teller came up with the compression by radiation implosion and spark plug ignition concepts, and packaging all three concepts together in the "Equilibrium Thermonuclear". This will stand until we see what is in the spy Klaus Fuchs 1945 patent application with J. Von Neumann!
Technical details and accuracy do not make up for the clear bias and antipathy that Mr. Rhodes has towards Edward Teller, and the great effort made to make Teller look in the worst possible light as a human being. This is one of the few shortcoming in an otherwise magnificently told story about nuclear weapons and their continuing shadow as weapons of mass destruction in hands of rogue states or terrorists...An absolutely MUST READ!
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