The Bomb: A Life
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.(Mar.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.