Bombshell : The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy - Hardcover

Joseph Albright; Marcia Kunstel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081292861X ISBN 13: 9780812928617

Publisher: Times Books, 1997

Synopsis

Ted Hall was a physics prodigy so gifted that he was asked to join the Manhattan Project when he was only eighteen years old.  There, in wartime Los Alamos, working under Robert Oppenheimer and Bruno Rossi, Hall helped build the atomic bomb.  To his friends and coworkers he was a brilliant young rebel with a boundless future in atomic science.  To his Soviet spymasters, he was something else: "Mlad," their mole within Los Alamos, a most hidden and valuable asset and the men who first slipped them the secrets to the making of the atomic bomb.

In a book that will force the revision of fifty years of scholarship and reporting on the Cold War, award-winning journalists Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel reveal for the first time a devastatingly effective Soviet spy network that infiltrated the Manhattan Project and ferried America's top atomic secrets to Stalin.  At the heart of the network was Hall, who was so secret an operative that even Klaus Fuchs, his fellow Manhattan Project scientist and Soviet agent, had no idea they were comrades.  Bombshell tracks Hall from his days as a brilliant schoolboy in New York City, when he came under the influence of his older brother's radical tracts, and on to Harvard, Los Alamos, and Chicago, where Hall continued to spy even after the war was over, passing more secrets while the Soviets were trying to build the Hydrogen bomb.

For forty years only a few Russians knew what Ted Hall really did.  Now Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel reveal the astonishing true story of the atomic spies who got away.  Bombshell is history at its most explosive.

About this title

Review

Recruited into the super-secret Manhattan Project while still a teenager, albeit a teenager who had already passed through Harvard, Ted Hall was unquestionably brilliant. But Hall, now an elderly physicist living in England, claims he was also very naive. While working to develop the atomic bomb for the United States, Hall approached Soviet intelligence and proceeded to pass along secrets. His breaches of security, while unknown outside intelligence circles until recently, dwarf the work of better-known Cold War operatives. And what's perhaps most startling is his motivation for giving the Soviets the secrets of the American bomb. Relying on recently declassified materials and interviews with the participants in the plot, Bombshell reads like an inventive spy novel, yet it's entirely true.

From the Publisher

"Bombshellcombines outstanding research and compelling narrative. It's amazing and fascinating--the best report we shall ever have on the American physicist spy at Los Alamos who stole the plans for the atomic bomb and gave them to the Russians."
--Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun

"Albright and Kunstel do an excellent job of clarifying the complex processes involved in making the atomic bomb, pausing even to explain various false starts and unworkable procedures that often preceded the program's periodic breakthroughs".
--Allen Weinstein, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Edition details

• Publisher: Times Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 081292861X
• ISBN 13: 9780812928617
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 399