Rating: 
Summary: It Takes Two to Tango.
Review: What an amazing, shocking and very objective history book!
Like the bomb it describes, book consists of: "core", "tamper" and a "shell equipped with explosives". The "core" content is for science lovers who want to learn how the greatest minds had engineered first deadly nuclear weapons during and after the WWII. The "tamper" of this book is devoted to history of Soviet's espionage in USA; fascinating and recommended for spy stories' aficionados. The rest is the "body" (or shell), wrapping this text up in "high explosive" details of confrontation with Russia's war/post-war communism and tens politics of Cold War.
Lives, tragedies, disappointments, dilemmas, mistakes and successes of scientists, politicians and other key "dancers" on stage during these times are masterfully presented.
Mr. TRU(E)MAN - you have saved the world from nuclear disaster, how can I thank you?!
Rating: 
Summary: Ways of Being Deadly
Review: What is most amazing for me in this book is its appreciation of a poem by Osip Mandelstam, who died in captivity, "for writing a poem, 'The Stalin Epigram,' the most ferocious portrait of the dictator anyone ever devised." (p. 34) A lot of the information here was helpful for me to understand the internal hysteria involved in being part of a system which depends upon terror for the ultimate achievement of whatever it wants. The way it works, "Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses," hardly compares to the desires which it can't grasp. There is a world of reasons for every word in that poem.
Rating:
Summary: What on earth were we thinking!?
Review: While perhaps not as engaging as Mr. Rhodes' "The Making of the A-Bomb", this book will occasionally surprise the reader with some utterly frightening passages.Did you know, for instance, that the yield from one of the early thermonuclear tests went out of control? Did you know that the US came within days of authorizing the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean war? The only thing I found lacking in this book was a closer study of the effects of the tests themselves. A scientific creation of this magnitude deserves more study. Mr. Rhodes spends more time on the political chess game between the US and the USSR than on the science behind the development of the bomb (although there is a great deal of technical information).
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