Thirteen Days of Atomigeddon 2: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

[james_davis_nicoll]

“The deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because they are possible to find.” The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

As ever, corrections accepted but I won't be able to act on them until tonight.

Comments

[monte davis (from livejournal.com)]

As a science writer, I greatly admired the book's craft -- the positioning and "staging" of scientific and technical exposition in counterpoint with the historical and military narratives. Marshalling what the lay reader needs to know is hard; deploying it at the right time, in the right dosage, is really hard.

The microsecond-by-microsecond description of the first detonation is a minor masterpiece in itself. A while back, I asked Charlie Stross if he'd had it in mind when writing the description of the induced supernova in Iron Sunrise. IIRC, he replied that it hadn't been deliberate, but he remembered the Rhodes passage vividly and wouldn't be surprised if its influence had been in the mix.

[cshalizi.livejournal.com]

That connection hadn't occurred to me when I read Iron Sunrise, but now that you point it out, it seems compelling.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Tom Clancy did something similar in The Sum of All Fears, though there it's a thermonuclear device, and it doesn't work quite right (though it's still a fizzle several times more powerful than Hiroshima).

[rwpikul.livejournal.com]

I happen to still have a copy and ISTR that it was actually about the same as Hiroshima.

(Checks)

The yield of the Denver device was 11,200 tons or 10.16kt, while a Little Boy bomb had a yield of 16kt. What I we remembering was a later report that the device was "less than fifteen kilotonnes."

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

Originally published in 1986, the copy I have is the 25th edition from 2012. Context matters: when Rhodes began work on this in the 1970s, the US under Carter and the Soviet Union under whichever doddering old fool it was that week had cast aside the illusion of detente for franker rivalry.

About the breakdown of detente in the late 1970s - the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan was the event that definitively ended the thaw in the Cold War that Nixon and Kissinger initiated. But it was the Reagan administration and the push for the so-called "Star Wars" anti-ballistic missile system that plunged relations back into the Cold War again. It wasn't until Gorbachev assumed power that relations began to get better again, for the few years left of the Soviet Union's existence.

[harimad.livejournal.com]

Even before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter was becoming a soured idealist about US-SU relations. The invasion, of course, pounded the final two dozen nails in that coffin. But if you look at defense budgets under Carter and Reagan (and remember that the 1981 budget was Carter's, not Reagans) you can see that evolution.

Also, before Star Wars Reagan was making noises about moving more and bigger nukes into Europe. At the same time was NATO exercise ABLE ARCHER, which simulated a nuclear war in Europe; the Soviet Union was the unnamed opponent, of course. The Soviet Union thought that Reagan/NATO was using ABLE ARCHER as a ruse for a nuclear first strike ... and therefore started making preparations to participate in a nuclear war.

It was a close-run thing.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Reagan's change of heart came a little bit before Gorbachev took power, and seems to've been inspired by a combination of CIA reports showing how close Able Archer came to sparking a nuclear war, and a screening of The Day After. I know some historians have suggested that if Reagan deserves any credit for ending the Cold War, it's in backing down and giving Gorbachev the political capital to make reforms, instead of pushing him the way Eisenhower and Kennedy did Khrushchev.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

What is striking about The Making of the Atomic Bomb is that Rhodes brought a novelist's style to writing his history. It doesn't hurt that there were many truly interesting people involved of course, but Rhodes really makes people like Leo Szilard vividly alive on the page. It's a history that reads like a novel, starting from page one to the end. I've read other histories that come close to what Rhodes pulled off (James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom for one), but never one with the sort of verve Rhodes gave this work.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

Yeah, the way to Reagan's heart was through movies evidently. Too bad someone didn't show him a film like El Norte when making policy for Central America.

As for pushing Khrushchev, well, the U2 incident didn't help relations for Eisenhower and it wasn't Kennedy who tried to sneak nuclear missiles into Cuba, even if he did authorize the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

The 1970s were scary as the logic of MAD played itself out with the Soviets deploying new missiles that gave them the capability of launching a first strike on U.S. missile silos while still maintaining a reserve that could be launched at U.S. cities. So the U.S. was developing newer missiles like the MX to counter Soviet moves, and so on.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Demonstrate the essential moral difference between IRBMs in Turkey, aimed at Russia, and IRBMs in Cuba, aimed at the USA.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

There isn't, which is why the U.S. quietly removed them from Turkey after the crisis had passed. However what Khrushchev did was reckless and he knew what a dangerous game he was playing. Thankfully, he stopped playing it.

[peter-erwin.livejournal.com]

I can still remember a cover from either Time or Newsweek showing a dove labeled "Detente", lying crushed in the tracks of a Soviet tank. So, yeah, there was definitely that idea at the time, and Carter suffered politically because of the perception that he'd been foolishly trying to maintain detente with the Soviets.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

You're overlooking the issue of rhetoric. Kennedy took a hardline stance during the campaign and in the early part of his administration, which forced Khrushchev to reciprocate to keep his own hardliners off his back. Americans have built up such a mythology around JFK that it's easy to forget how frightening his "missile gap" talk must have sounded to the Soviets, who knew full well that the Americans were already outproducing them.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

No, Khrushchev didn't know how reckless he was being. He figured, based upon Kennedy's bungling of the Bay of Pigs and Vienna Summit, and weak response to the Berlin Crisis, that JFK would roll over once again, especially since any strong objection to the Cuban missiles would by hypocritical in light of the Turkish IRBMs. Unfortunately Kennedy was a hypocrite (or at least his military advisers were) and pushed the world to the brink of war because the Soviets had done to the US what the US had already done to the Soviets.

[eub.livejournal.com]

I knew the story, but Rhodes really made it... sing is the wrong word. Threnodize I guess we have it. I think it's a defining story of the United States, the 'West', some slice of civilization.

I did not know all of the background, like his telling of the recent birth of strategic bombing, i.e. conscious bombing of non-combatants, as a thing to be done by non-terrorists. One detail I found remarkable was the early thinking about aerial bombing, before it had ever really been done: some people thought of aerial bombing as a superweapon that would be completely unwithstandable, and even as a weapon that would end war.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

No, Khrushchev was pushing for a nuclear missile buildup in hopes of being able to then reduce the size of the Soviet Union's conventional forces and then be able do more to improve the overall Soviet economy. Sputnik wasn't just a propaganda stunt, it was entirely part of the Soviet Union's nuclear ICBM program. The U.S. of course was stunned by Sputnik and started playing catch-up in a big way, and Eisenhower certainly fumed as Kennedy made his "missile gap" rhetoric work against Nixon, because Eisenhower didn't want it to be known how much ground the U.S. had made up during the last two years of his second term. Kennedy was doing what politicians do best, making hay about a fear of the Soviets that U.S. voters had. That rhetoric wasn't as worrisome to Khrushchev as you seem to believe it was, nor was Khrushchev worried by hardliners in his own party.

[david wilford (from livejournal.com)]

Oh sure, Khrushchev hoped that Kennedy would back down, but the fact that he sent the missiles secretly was actually a tell that the Soviets did not want a confrontation. Kennedy initially thought of appealing to the Soviets secretly when U.S. intelligence revealed the missile sites in Cuba, but rejected it because it would make the U.S. look weak, hence the crisis.