Summary of Annie Jacobsen's The Pentagon's Brain

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 On March 1, 1954, a group of American scientists entered a time when a machine they had created could trigger the end of the world. The most powerful bomb in the history of the world was about to be detonated just nineteen miles away. No human being had ever before been this close to the kind of power this bomb was expected to deliver.

#2 The men on the USNS Ainsworth heard O’Keefe’s voice loud and clear outside, standing beside Freedman. These were the physicists who had designed and built the bomb. They were here to witness the results of their engineered creation.

#3 The Teller-Ulam scheme meant that the hydrogen bomb was designed to hold itself together for an extra hundred-millionth of a second, allowing its hydrogen isotopes to fuse and create a chain reaction of nuclear energy, called fusion, producing a potentially infinite amount of power.

#4 The scientists were shocked by the size of the explosion. The mushroom cloud was forty miles wide, and the fallout was headed in an easterly direction, directly for Enyu Island.