Dark sun : the making of the hydrogen bomb
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references (pages [689]-703) and index.

In this work of history, science, and politics, 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. This book 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. This stalemate, the author makes clear, forced the superpowers to a 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 - revelations based on previously undisclosed Soviet and U.S. sources.