The Bomb
A Life
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Before the Bomb, there were simply 'bombs', lower case. But it was the twentieth century, one hundred years of almost incredible scientific progress, that saw the birth of the Bomb, the human race's most powerful and most destructive discovery.
In this magisterial and enthralling account, Gerard DeGroot gives us the life story of the Bomb, from its birth in the turn-of-the-century physics labs of Europe to a childhood in the New Mexico desert of the 1940s, from adolescence and early adulthood in Nagasaki and Bikini, Australia and Siberia to unsettling maturity in test sites and missile silos all over the globe. By turns horrific, awe-inspiring and blackly comic, The Bomb is never less than compelling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It is by now an overly familiar story: a hitherto complacent American military is spurred into action by terrifying intelligence of Nazi scientific advances and fear that Hitler will have an atomic bomb first. Then come heroic counterefforts by the dedicated Allied scientists of the Manhattan Project, the dizzying intoxication of victory, the unimaginably bleak and sobering "morning after" reality of massive devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War, nuclear weapons proliferation, brinkmanship and strategic stalemate. And always the great unanswerable question, why? In a briskly entertaining and compulsively readable "life" of the atom bomb, DeGroot, a professor of history at Scotland's University of St. Andrews, never finds a unique angle of insight into his subject. Is he correct in suggesting that the "really big decisions" about the bomb were made "by around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis"? It seems a rather slender reed upon which to build a full-scale biography, one that focuses heavily on the 1950s, which DeGroot sees as more important historically than "the endless talk over SALT and START" of later decades. Readers who have scant familiarity with the topic will find this account (which goes through the post Cold War era) balanced and accessible. Anyone searching for fresh insights or a deeper, more nuanced interpretation will continue searching. 23 b&w photos.
