I’ve read The Making of The Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun (recommended by my friends and by AskHistorians). Dark Sun covered the Soviet developments to some degree, and I’m curious to learn more. Instead of picking a book pretty much at random or based on online reviews, I figured I should ask you guys for a recommendation.
While reading Dark Sun, I found myself interested in the scientific, political, and military aspects of the programs, but the descriptions of who met who for espionage were too long and bit boring (though, obviously, no one can ask for a book on the Soviet program that excludes the details of spying). I guess my cut-off date of interest is about mid-1960s.
So, can anybody recommend a book that you’ve read on the Soviet project?
I’m not a historian, and this isn’t homework or an assignment or anything, I’m reading this just for fun.
Thank you in advance.
The two books that I put at the top of my list for this are:
David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (1994): Published at the same time as Dark Sun and benefitting from the same new treasure-trove of post-Soviet sources, Holloway's book is the "classic" in this field, the first truly serious historical account of the Soviet program. It is far less espionage-centered than Rhodes' book, to be sure.
Michael Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (2009): Gordin is (like me) a historian of science, and so his approach to the issue is less policy-based than Holloway's (the latter being a political scientist) and more attentive to questions about the information-flow interactions between the US and Soviet programs (including but not limited to espionage and technical surveillance). His account also draws on sources released only after Holloway's book about how the Soviets did and did not use the espionage data, as well as information about US technical collection of surveillance about the Soviet project. It's a comparative history of the US and Soviet bomb projects with an eye towards similarities and differences, centered around the American detection of the first Soviet atomic bomb test. It's a fun read and complements Holloway's book very well.
There is far less available if one is interested in later Cold War; most of what has been released by the Russians is about their work in the 1940s and 1950s. So if your cutoff point is the 1960s — great. Because if you wanted to know what was happening in the 1960s and later, well, good luck. The Russians have since made it much harder to do research on this topic so there is unlikely to be too much new scholarship that has much depth to it for some time now.