Cold war history
Tales of the nuclear age
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Cold war history
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Rhodes' history of the scientists that designed the first atomic bomb reads like a thriller - from the discovery of the atom to electron to neutron to building piles of uranium and graphite. The reader races with the scientists in a fight against bureaucracy, time, and nature's secrets. |
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Recruited into the super-secret Manhattan Project while still a teenager, albeit a teenager who had already passed through Harvard, Ted Hall was unquestionably brilliant. But Hall, now an elderly physicist living in England, claims he was also very naive. While working to develop the atomic bomb for the United States, Hall approached Soviet intelligence and proceeded to pass along secrets. His breaches of security, while unknown outside intelligence circles until recently, dwarf the work of better-known Cold War operatives. And what's perhaps most startling is his motivation for giving the Soviets the secrets of the American bomb. Relying on recently declassified materials and interviews with the participants in the plot, Bombshell reads like an inventive spy novel, yet it's entirely true. |
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Atomic Spaces looks at the Manhattan Project as a program that produced not just weapons but, more importantly, ideas, beliefs, social systems, racial and sexual and economic relations, new languages, new diseases, and-- finally-- a new form of American culture. Using huge archives of previously classified or hidden materials, from architectural plans to medical records, Atomic Spaces is, I believe, the first attempt to create a cultural and moral history of the Manhattan Project. Illustrated with photographs, plans, posters and documents, looking at native American rituals and worker songs, security records and the reports of labor informers, the book weaves a new and very different picture of America's secret spaces where the first atomic bombs were conceived, built, and used. |
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