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The Secret That Exploded
Hardcover
Published January 1, 1981
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 11, 2013
i really want to meet this author! apparently he went to emory; i'm gonna try and get some emory alum friends to hook me up...
December 5, 2022
I bought my copy of this book at the Dickson Street Bookshop in Fayetteville, AR during a visit to that city earlier this year.
This book is a time capsule from the Cold War - evocatively capturing the angst and lunacy of a time when we were locked in thermonuclear confrontation "toe to toe with the Rooskies" (to quote Major Kong from the movie Dr. Strangelove) and only a single computer slipup or human error away from total destruction. The events of the book take place in the early 1980's. Howard Morland had left the Air Force under clouded circumstances over his objections to the Vietnam war, and slowly drifted into anti-nuclear activism, first regarding nuclear power generation, then focusing on the elimination of nuclear weapons. His slant on this topic was that the American public was powerless to influence policy regarding the size and deployment of the nation's nuclear stockpile due to the intense secrecy that had surrounded the nuclear weapons program since its very inception during WW2. His solution: empower the voting public with more information - specifically, by revealing the last great nuclear secret: how does a thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb work? How is the energy of a small fission explosion harnessed and directed to ignite nuclear fusion? How do such a weapon's internal parts interrelate to make this happen? All of this was unknown to those outside the nuclear weapons industry, but there were tantalizing hints in published literature available to the general public. So Morland launched off, under the auspices of research for writing an article for "The Progressive" magazine, to search through literature and visit the various sites in the US where nuclear weapon components were manufactured and speak with employees. Slowly he pieced the picture together - the concept of radiation pressure from the fission trigger compressing and heating the thermonuclear fuel to trigger fusion. A pretty amazing accomplishment for a man who had no formal training in nuclear physics. His initial article for the magazine contained one significant omission in the mechanism but in general got the story right - bringing down the wrath of the Department of Energy, which got an injunction issued to kill the article due to "national security" concerns. The legal wranglings that followed were amusing to read about, and ultimately the government dropped its case and the secret was revealed. I liked Morland's writing style, which was clear and lucid. The book was a little over long, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Five out of five stars.
This book is a time capsule from the Cold War - evocatively capturing the angst and lunacy of a time when we were locked in thermonuclear confrontation "toe to toe with the Rooskies" (to quote Major Kong from the movie Dr. Strangelove) and only a single computer slipup or human error away from total destruction. The events of the book take place in the early 1980's. Howard Morland had left the Air Force under clouded circumstances over his objections to the Vietnam war, and slowly drifted into anti-nuclear activism, first regarding nuclear power generation, then focusing on the elimination of nuclear weapons. His slant on this topic was that the American public was powerless to influence policy regarding the size and deployment of the nation's nuclear stockpile due to the intense secrecy that had surrounded the nuclear weapons program since its very inception during WW2. His solution: empower the voting public with more information - specifically, by revealing the last great nuclear secret: how does a thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb work? How is the energy of a small fission explosion harnessed and directed to ignite nuclear fusion? How do such a weapon's internal parts interrelate to make this happen? All of this was unknown to those outside the nuclear weapons industry, but there were tantalizing hints in published literature available to the general public. So Morland launched off, under the auspices of research for writing an article for "The Progressive" magazine, to search through literature and visit the various sites in the US where nuclear weapon components were manufactured and speak with employees. Slowly he pieced the picture together - the concept of radiation pressure from the fission trigger compressing and heating the thermonuclear fuel to trigger fusion. A pretty amazing accomplishment for a man who had no formal training in nuclear physics. His initial article for the magazine contained one significant omission in the mechanism but in general got the story right - bringing down the wrath of the Department of Energy, which got an injunction issued to kill the article due to "national security" concerns. The legal wranglings that followed were amusing to read about, and ultimately the government dropped its case and the secret was revealed. I liked Morland's writing style, which was clear and lucid. The book was a little over long, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Five out of five stars.
April 6, 2025
one of the books of interest to people if you want to know a bit about Ulam and Teller, though it's from the slightly flaky progressive side of things
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews