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Saturday, May 21, 2005
Reading List: Brotherhood of the Bomb
- Herken. Gregg. Brotherhood of the Bomb. New York: Henry Holt, 2002. ISBN 0-8050-6589-X.
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What more's to be said about the tangled threads of science, politics,
ego, power, and history that bound together the lives of Ernest O. Lawrence,
J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Edward Teller from the origin of the Manhattan
Project through the postwar controversies over nuclear policy and the
development of thermonuclear weapons? In fact, a great deal, as
declassification of FBI files, including wiretap transcripts, release
of decrypted
Venona
intercepts of Soviet espionage cable traffic, and documents from
Moscow archives opened to researchers since the collapse of the
Soviet Union have provide a wealth of original source material
illuminating previously dark corners of the epoch.
Gregg Herken, a senior historian and curator at the National Air and Space Museum, draws upon these resources to explore the accomplishments, conflicts, and controversies surrounding Lawrence, Oppenheimer, and Teller, and the cold war era they played such a large part in defining. The focus is almost entirely on the period in which the three were active in weapons development and policy--there is little discussion of their prior scientific work, nor of Teller's subsequent decades on the public stage. This is a serious academic history, with almost 100 pages of source citations and bibliography, but the story is presented in an engaging manner which leaves the reader with a sense of the personalities involved, not just their views and actions. The author writes with no discernible ideological bias, and I noted only one insignificant technical goof.
Posted at
15:24
