Making Weapons, Talking Peace: A Physicist's Odyssey from Hiroshima to Geneva

This thought-provoking book conveys subtly its author's ""sense of sin'' (J. Robert Oppenheimer once said the original A-bomb scientists ``knew sin'' after Hiroshima) stemming from his apprenticeship as a nuclear physicist under Ernest Lawrence at the Berkeley Radiation Lab and at Livermore immediately before the Manhattan Project tested the first A-bomb at Los Alamos. York, in the decades following 1945, ventured into consultant, advisory, administrative and ultimately quasi-diplomatic roles that found him working with nuclear greats like Oppenheimer, Hans Betha, Edward Teller and others. Fragmentarily but often tellingly, he offers glimpses of the post-Sputnik response that took the form of a nationwide debate among politicos and scientists about Teller's proposed H-Bomb. York presents fresh insights into the history of the arms race that he sees today as one of the horns of a frightening superpower dilemmaas noted in the book's title. He culminates with a description of his participation in the ill-fated Salt II Treaty negotiated in Geneva. Photos. (November 23)