on Power

 

As streames are, Power is;
Those blest flowers that dwell
At the rough streames calme head,
Thrive and do well,
But having left their roots, and themselves given
To the stream’s tyrannous rage, alas, are driven
Through mills, and rocks, and woods,
And at last, almost consum’d in going,
In the sea are lost.

John Donne (From Satire III)

There is a remarkable book out there, on the history of US nuclear program, Brotherhood of the Bomb from Gregg Herken, subtitled “The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller”. Based on declassified documents (FBI, DOE, KGB…) and many additional new sources, Brotherhood is a conclusive historic summary that sets the record straight for a number of highly-charged controversies. With the help of FBI dossiers, secret meeting notes and decoded Soviet cables, one can finally get a pretty clear idea about the people behind the nuclear weapon research, their characters, motives and actions.

The book is surprisingly slim given the material covered and is written in somewhat dry style - there is no literary embellishment filler and the expository parts are short and to the point; as a professional historian, Herken lets the documented facts speak for themselves. The underlying history and the actions of the protagonist are dramatic enough - the developments from the cyclotron research through the Manhattan project to the multi-megaton thermonuclear bombs, the Soviet espionage, the US response to it, the paranoia of arms race and the resulting witch-hunt, the bureaucratic infighting over the control of nuclear weapons, the ambitions, aliances and rivalries of the leading scientists, founding of Los Alamos and Livermore labs, the rise and fall of Robert Oppenheimer. 

The Brotherhood is a great book for anyone interested in this wild science-meets-espionage and conspiracy thriller material. It is also an illuminating story about the life inside the corridors of power, idealism and ambition, moral dilemmas and terrible compromises, about the price that a man pays for covering up his past.