Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [223]
The Cuban Missile Crisis stand ignobly at the summit of postwar nuclear threats and counterthreats. Among the leading sources are Alexander Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble’: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958—1964 (New York: W W Norton, 1997); Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd edn. (New York: Longman,
1999); James G. Blight and Philip Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); Sheldon M. Stern, Averting ‘The Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); and William Taubman’s wonderful biography Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York: W W Norton, 2003).
CHAPTER EIGHT. THE WORLD’S BOMB
Scientists’ hopes to re-establish their pre-war republic find voice in Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb; Kevles, The Physicists; Fermi, Atoms for the World; Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times: In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and especially Niels Bohr, ‘For an Open World’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 6/7 (July 1950), 213-19.
On the British bomb project, see three impressive books by Margaret Gowing, the historian of Britain’s Atomic Energy Authority: Britain and Atomic Energy 1939—1945 and (New York: St Martin’s, 1964), Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945—1952, i. Policy Making, and ii. Policy Execution (London: Macmillan, 1974). Also helpful are Brian Cathcart, Test of Greatness: Britain’s Struggle for the Atom Bomb (London: John Murray, 1994); E. M. Fitzgerald, ‘Allison, Attlee and the Bomb: Views of the 1947 British Decision to Build an Atom Bomb’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, 122/1 (1977), 49—56; Graham Spinardi, ‘Aldermaston and British Nuclear Weapons Development: Testing the “Zuckerman Thesis” ’, Social Studies of Science, 27 (1997), 547—82; and C. P Snow, The New Men (London: Macmillan, 1960 [1954]).
The French story is told most thoroughly and entertainingly by Bertrand Goldschmidt in Atomic Rivals, trans. by Georges M. Temmer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). See also Spencer R. Weart, Scientists in Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), and Jules Gueron, ‘Atomic Energy in Continental Western Europe’, Lewis and Wilson, with Rabinowitch, in Alamogordo plus Twenty-Five Years, 140—58.
The definitive study of Israel’s quest for the bomb is Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). See also Meirion Jones, ‘Britain’s Dirty Secret’, New Statesman, 13 Mar. 2006, and Howard Kohn and Barbara Newman, ‘How Israel Got the Bomb’, Rolling Stone, 12 Jan. 1977. Much of the context for Israeli decisionmaking—US policy toward the Middle East—is provided by Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), and Peter L. Hahn, Trapped in the Middle East: US Policy toward the Arab— Israeli Conflict, 1945—1961 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
2004).
Sources on the South African nuclear program include J. D. L. Moore, South Africa and Nuclear Proliferation: South Africa's Nuclear Capabilities and Intentions in the Context of International Non-Proliferation Policies (New York: St Martin’s, 1987); Barbara Rogers and Zdenek Cervenka, The Nuclear Axis: Secret Collaboration between West Germany and South Africa (New York: Times Books, 1978); Thomas B. Cochran, ‘Highly Enriched Uranium Production for South African Nuclear Weapons’, Science and Global Security, 4 (1994), 161—74; Waldo Stumpf, ‘Birth and Death of the South African Nuclear Weapons Programme’, http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/rsa/nuke/stumpf.