Harte John. The Race for the Atom Bomb: How Soviet Russia Stole the Secrets of the Manhattan Project

USA, Pen & Sword, 2023. — 282 p. — ISBN 978 1 39904 910 8.Гонка за атомной бомбой: как Советская Россия украла секреты Манхэттенского проекта
After observing with awe the first ever explosion of a nuclear bomb on 16 July 1945, the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who was responsible for making it, famously quoted the most significant words from the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’
He was a haunted man.
To encapsulate who and what J. Robert Oppenheimer was behind his public image as an American genius, to a new generation of readers unaccustomed to analysing and assessing history with a cool sense of proportion, is no easy task with so much false news nowadays. Digital technologies and social media have distracted us from our extraordinary achievements into an artificial world that separates us from our past as if it no longer influences us today or tomorrow. And yet, Oppenheimer was a national hero in America in 1945, even known as the
‘Father of the Atom Bomb’. But he was publicly humiliated in 1954 by the head of the Atomic Energy Commission and President Eisenhower, who accused him of being a national security risk. In only nine years he had leapt from triumph and fame to tragedy and distrust.WORLD CRISIS
Introduction
Chapter 1 Modern Times
Chapter 2 An Awkward Undergraduate
Chapter 3 A Tortured Adolescence
Chapter 4 The Magical Spell of Physics
Chapter 5 Different Strokes for Different Folks
Chapter 6 The World Beckons
Chapter 7 Oppie
REDS
Chapter 8 The Red Scare
Chapter 9 We the Living
Chapter 10 Political Activists
Chapter 11 The Atomic Bomb Project
Chapter 12 Who Was Kitty Harris?
Chapter 13 The Nuclear Programme
Chapter 14 Germany’s Secret Weapons
Chapter 15 The Intellectual and the Militarist
DESTROYER OF WORLDS
Chapter 16 Merchants of Death
Chapter 17 The Pied Piper of Los Alamos
Chapter 18 Achieving Critical Mass
Chapter 19 A Magical Place
Chapter 20 Dangerous Associations
Chapter 21 Problem Number One
Chapter 22 The Race for the Atom Bomb
Chapter 23 The Future of the Human Race
SOVIET SECRET AGENTS
Chapter 24 Soviet Spies Saving the World
Chapter 25 The Experimental Atomic Test
Chapter 26 A Japanese Target
Chapter 27 Japan
Chapter 28 Unconditional Surrender 1
Chapter 29 Back to Normal 1
Chapter 30 A World Transformed
Chapter 31 American Genius
WITCH-HUNT
Chapter 32 Enemies in Waiting
Chapter 33 Soviet Russia’s Atom Bomb
Chapter 34 Conspiracy Theories
Chapter 35 The Venona Revelations
Chapter 36 Witch-hunt
Chapter 37 The Problem of Survival
Chapter 38 The Hidden Struggle for the H-bomb
HUMILIATION
Chapter 39 Trial by Hysteria
Chapter 40 A Letter of Indictment
Chapter 41 One Thing is Certain