|
Books > History > General
At 18 years of age, Theodore Hall was the youngest physicist on the
Manhattan Project, hired as a junior at Harvard and put to work at
Los Alamos in 1944. Assigned the job of testing and refining the
complex implosion system for the plutonium bomb, Hall was described
as “amazingly brilliant” by his superiors on the project, many
of whom were Nobel Prize winners. But what Hall’s colleagues
didn’t know was that the teenaged Hall was also the youngest spy
taken on by the Soviet Union in search of secrets to the atomic
bomb. Spy With No Country tells the gripping story of a brilliant
scientist whose information about the plutonium bomb, including
detailed drawings and measurements, proved to be integral to the
Soviet’s development of nuclear capabilities. In the dying days
of World War II, defeat of the Third Reich became a matter of when,
not if. Tensions between wartime allies America and the Soviet
Union began to rise, and things only got hotter when the United
States refused to share information on its nuclear program. This
groundbreaking book paints a nuanced picture of a young man acting
on what he thought was best for the world. Neither a Communist nor
a Soviet sympathizer, Hall worked to ensure that America did not
monopolize the science behind the atomic bomb, which he felt may
have apocalyptic consequences. Instead, by providing the Soviets
with the secrets of the bomb, and thereby initiating “mutual
assured destruction,” Hall may have actually saved the world as
we know it. But his contributions to the Soviets certainly did not
go unnoticed. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover opened an investigation
into Hall, which was escalated when it was discovered that Hall’s
brother Edward was a rising star of the Air Force, leading the
development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Featuring
in-depth research from recently declassified FBI documents,
first-hand journals, and personal interviews, investigative
journalist Dave Lindorff uncovers the story of the atomic spy who
gave secrets away, and got away with it, too.
|
|