The Road From Los Alamos, Hans Bethe (ISBN 978-0883187074, American Institute of Physics)

I bought this book after reading the making of the atomic bomb. And then, as usual it ended up sitting on a shelf for a long time. After recently having read Dark Sun I decided it was time to get this book from Hans Bethe behind me. It was actually better than I expected and I found out a few things about the involvement of Hans Bethe in nuclear weapons research after Los Alamos. Despite coming back to work on the hydrogen bomb ‘because it had to be done’, Bethe also wrote numerous essays in advocating nuclear arms control. These make up the major part of the book. A small section is on physicists, basically obituaries for colleagues. As they are brief on purpose I didn’t find much interesting there. The last section has 2 scientific essays, one about his work on nuclear reactions in stars for which he won the Nobel prize and one on supernovas. These were brief but nice and worth reading. The bulk of the essays about nuclear weapons and the need for nuclear energy I found mostly interesting as a historical document as they were written by someone that was actively involved in nuclear weapons research. They illustrate both the inevitability and uselessness of designing ever more powerful nuclear weapons. It had to be done because the enemy would probably do it but at the same time the more powerful the bombs became the more unthinkable it became to ever use such weapons as use by either side would lead to mutual destruction. The strange thing is that long after both sides had reached the point that more and more powerful bombs didn’t increase security but on the contrary lead to less security the spending on new weapons continued. If you have to choose, I recommend reading the books from Richard Rhodes on this topic : The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun and Arsenals of Folly. The only exception is maybe the technical arguments discussed by Bethe against the Strategic Defense Initiative. It is a bit ironic that the START treaty ended this month and that Poetin announced he is ready for a world without a limit on the number of nuclear weapons. Even with nuclear arms reductions that took place since Gorbachev we still have more than enough more than powerful enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over.