Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb Paperback – Illustrated, August 6, 1996

Again, following The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Rhodes has done a fantastic job of taking us back to the early days of the nuclear age. The constant underlying theme is that there were alternatives to the constant mutual nuclear terror under which we live every day, but which thankfully, for the sake of our mental and emotional health, we (mostly) don’t obsess over. Were those alternatives ever realistic? Perhaps not. But history has a way of making seem inevitable that which really happened.Part One of this book focusses on Soviet espionage up to the end of World War II. Because of such men as Fuchs, Gold and others, the Soviets had a pretty good idea of what was going on with American bomb developments and were able to “piggyback” and greatly accelerate their own bomb program. Little attention is paid to the details of the American programs at places such as Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, probably because Rhodes has already described these in The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Perhaps the most startling (to me) revelation here is that on August 12, three days after Nagasaki, the U.S. released a report on the Manhattan Project that supplied the Soviet Union with information “nearly equivalent” to that which the Soviets had acquired through espionage during the war.Part Two is a history of the early Cold War years, usually in the context of the development of nuclear weapons. Perhaps most surprising was the meagerness of the U.S.’s nuclear force in the early years. As Lilienthal told Truman, “[T]his defense did not exist. There was no stockpile.” There were no weapons, just “piles of pieces.” At least this one bit of information apparently did not make it to the Soviets, who were busy trying to steal every bit they could. Rhodes describes the attempts at control of atomic weapons at least until 1947, the overriding growing mutual suspicion and distrust between the US and USSR, and the meeting of scientific and mathematical challenges culminating in the “Super,” or hydrogen bomb. We learn, among other things, that the initial problem assigned to the world’s first working electronic digital computer, ENIAC, was the hydrogen bomb. We learn also that there was serious opposition to building the hydrogen bomb at all.Part Three takes us through the designs and tests of the first hydrogen bombs, by the US and USSR, to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The scientific details of the design of “Mike,” the US thermonuclear that vaporized the island of Elugelab in 1952, are as horrifying as they are fascinating. Throughout, Rhodes explores the dichotomy between those who perceived the mutually destructive futility of a nuclear arms race, and those who pushed for ever more bombs with ever bigger “yield.” As Rhodes points out, “nuclear weapons are not cannonballs; how many times could either country be destroyed?” Many of those, like Oppenheimer, who had the vision to perceive the ultimate futility of the arms race were blacklisted and/or persecuted.Rhodes asks a fundamental question: “If real political leaders understood from one end of the Cold War to the other that even one hydrogen bomb was sufficient deterrence, why did they allow the arms race to devour the wealth of the nation while it increased the risk of an accidental Armageddon?” The answer for both sides is essentially the power of the military-industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned: “Far more influential on the US side were such domestic political phenomena as competition among the military services, coalitions of scientific and industrial organizations promoting new technologies, the pressure of ‘defense’ as a political issue and defense spending to prime the economic pump, particularly in election years. Similar patterns obtained along somewhat different lines for the Soviet command economy.”Still, Rhodes ends on an optimistic note. While the world will not soon be free of nuclear weapons because they serve so many purposes, “as instruments of destruction, they have long been obsolete.” One can only hope that he’s right. But it’s been only just over three-quarters of a century since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This is a worthy sequel to the author's Pulitzer Prize winning `The Making of the Atomic Bomb.' It admirably relates the history of post-WW2 atomic weapons (including the Soviet program) and the development of the `Super' (hydrogen/thermonuclear) Bomb. Theoretical and technical challenges are clearly profiled with conceptual, developmental, and testing milestones. Not least, the political context (the Berlin Airlift, Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc) is also fully explored.Soviet espionage dating from the earliest efforts at Los Alamos is detailed (Harry Gold, Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, the Rosenburgs, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, the Cohens). It reveals a ruthless régime (Joseph Stalin and Lavrenti Beria), but also a parent country bled white by the loss of over twenty million in WW2 (and all the more susceptible to new threats). Though espionage no doubt accelerated Soviet progress, able scientists like Igor Kurchatov and Andrei Sakharov fulfilled Bohr's prediction that scientific progress was inevitable across the globe. Prometheus did not discriminate.Major figures (J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Stanislaw Ulam, Louis Strauss, Curtis LeMay, etc) are also depicted (with the increasingly divisive politics of their times).The testing of `Mike' 1 November 1952 at Eniwetok revealed a single bomb that yielded 10.4 megatons, more than twice the power of all explosives used in WW2. Subsequent improvements have increased the easy agency and disastrous yield of subsequent generations of this weapon. During the Cuban Missile Crisis SAC had 7,000 megatons in the air ready (and eager?) to strike the USSR.Does superiority in weapons of mass destruction (liable to kill us even if successfully deployed against an enemy) make us safer or less safe? Is it (as Oppenheimer predicted) a case of "scorpions in a bottle?" Read this account and decide for yourself.