The Bomb: A Life

[Sequoia]

By Gerard DeGroot. Harvard University, May 2005, 397 pp.

Gerard DeGroot chronicles a broad tableau of nuclear history from the first realization of the possibility of the atom bomb in the physics labs of Europe, to its birth in Los Alamos, its use in war, and its subsequent proliferation. The book spans seven decades of the bomb’s influence on politics and popular culture, but DeGroot puts far more emphasis on the period before the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Controversially, he downplays the events that followed, particularly the arms control negotiations of later decades. “Once the atomic powers decided that the best protection against a bomb was another bomb, any talk of arms reduction was rendered irrevocably futile,” he writes.

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Really good and scary. I didn't read every word but the chapter about Testing and Hiroshima were scary as hell. What I gleaned from this is, we are all guinas pigs and our government lies constantly about the danger we are in. In the 1950's is was just so cool and patriotic to support The Bomb, and if you didn't, guess what you were? That's right, a traitor and "You're either with us or with the communist". Nothing ever changes.