Also a necessary part of the history is the evolution of Soviet nuclear weapons and testing. The story of how they acquired that knowledge as well as the stories of the individuals responsible for the espionage makes for fascinating reading.

Large portions of the book are devoted to detailing how the Soviet Union obtained atomic weapons technology from persons within the Manhattan Project and how they'd begun their own development by the end of the war. Dark Sun, continuing the history of nuclear arms begun with The Making of the Atomic Bomb, includes 2 important facets of the nuclear arms story: espionage and Soviet nuclear arms research. It's partly that the record of how thermonuclear theory was developed into a weapon is only a piece of the huge story he tells. Because that was a history of atomic research, the Manhattan Project, and the resulting bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I'd expected Dark Sun to be a history in a similar style. 'Years ago I'd read and enjoyed Rhodes's earlier The Making of the Atomic Bomb. How the first and only direct nuclear confrontation between the superpowers was also very nearly the lastįollowing the lives of the atomic scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Dark Sun is the definitive work on the hydrogen bomb, showing why the world wars that devastated the first half of the century can never happen again. nuclear weapons - while flying deliberately provocative daytime missions over Soviet cities How the SAC fought for independent control of U.S. How the Soviets were able to produce a carbon copy of the first U.S. Now, in this majestic new masterpiece of history, science, and politics, he tells for the first time the secret story of how and why the hydrogen bomb was made, and traces the path by which this supreme artifact of twentieth-century technology became the defining issue of the Cold War.įrom the day in 1941 when the first word of Anglo-American atomic-bomb research arrived in Moscow to the week of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Dark Sun is full of unexpected - and sometimes hair-raising - revelations based on previously undisclosed Soviet and U.S.

Richard Rhodes' landmark history of the atomic bomb won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb lays bare the secret heart of the Cold War.

Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes