The Hell Bomb

William L. Laurence's The Hell Bomb is a grim, urgent warning about the hydrogen bomb and the secrecy that surrounds it. Written as both science writing and civic argument, it insists that democracy cannot survive if citizens are kept ignorant of weapons capable of ending civilization. Laurence opens with his wartime glimpse of the H-bomb idea at Los Alamos in 1945, where physicists such as Hans Bethe were already imagining fusion on a catastrophic scale, and follows the scientific path from speculation about the sun's fuel to the discovery of deuterium and the possibility of igniting it with an atomic bomb. He explains fission, critical mass, uranium, plutonium, and uranium-233 in plain language, then turns to the far more alarming problem of triggering deuterium or tritium. The book weighs the practical and financial hurdles, the role of tritium production, and the speed with which America could build such a weapon using Manhattan Project infrastructure. Laurence also confronts espionage, especially Klaus Fuchs's betrayal, and the Cold War race it intensified. Most chillingly, he explores blast, heat, fallout, atmospheric poisoning, and cobalt contamination, portraying the hydrogen bomb as a weapon of unprecedented destruction and radioactive ruin. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.