Dark Sun: Book Review

Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb Aug 6, 1996 by Richard Rhodes, is a great book, but probably not for the faint hearted. If you have labored under the delusion that humans are rational animals, forget about it. We are sometimes an intellectual species, but a very irrational one, driven by vanity, paranoia and other prehistoric emotions, quite unsuited to life in a world with thermonuclear weapons.

The penultimate chapter tells the story of the Cuban missile crisis, and it's pretty terrifying how close some pretty smart people came to utterly destroying the world. This was at a point when both sides had enough nuclear weapons to destroy civilization many times over.

We had gotten to that point thanks to the paranoia and other frailties of some of the smartest guys around, including Curtis LeMay, Edward Teller, John Wheeler, and John von Neumann. Only the cool heads of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy narrowly saved the day more than once.

It's terrifying to think what might have happened if an idiot like Trump, or even a dimwit like W, had been in charge.

I recommend the book highly. There are no equations, but if you are a physicist with a few tens of billions of dollars and access to certain critical materials and technologies, there is enough detail to build your own bomb.

I've written a lot more about it here.

I know that WB has read it and would be particularly interested in his comments.

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