Volume 35, Number 5 · March 31, 1988
Nuclear Wizards
By Lord Zuckerman
Rabi: Scientist and Citizen
by John S. Rigden
Basic Books, 302 pp., $21.95
Toward a Livable World: Leo Szilard and the Crusade for Nuclear Arms Control
edited by Helen S. Hawkins, edited by G. Allen Greb, edited by Gertrud Weiss Szilard
MIT Press, 499 pp., $50.00
Better a Shield than a Sword: Perspectives on Defense and Technology
by Edward Teller
The Free Press, 257 pp., $19.95
I suppose that a figure could be put to the number of books that tell the story of the unfolding of our nuclear age. There must be hundreds about the development of atomic weapons, and no doubt as many more will be published as further chapters are added to the story. This is not to say that we can all follow what we read about the way the anatomy of the atom was laid bare. What is important is that all of us know that the physicists were not joking when they said that if an atom were split—whatever the term meant—the energy that had previously been bound within the subatomic particles of which it consists could be released, as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were to bear witness, as a fabulously destructive force. We can be sure that they are not exaggerating now when they tell us that it is possible to pack sufficient destructive power into a single hydrogen bomb—say, one of the many that could get through President Reagan's SDI defensive screen—to crush and burn to a frazzle all the inhabitants of Washington, D.C., even all those of the whole of Manhattan. Winston Churchill was on sound ground when he said that the bomb would carry 'mankind outside the scope of human control.'[1]
Review, 8578 words
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