Arms and the physicist / Herbert F. York.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Making Weapons, Talking Peace -- National Security and the Nuclear-Test Ban / Herbert York and Jerome B. Wiesner -- The Arms Race and the Fallacy of the Last Move -- A Personal View of the Arms Race -- Military Technology and National Security -- Arms-Limitation Strategies -- Thinking about the Arms Race -- Origins of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory -- Debate Over the Hydrogen Bomb -- Eisenhower's Other Warning -- Negotiating and the U.S. Bureaucracy -- Comprehensive Test-Ban Negotiations -- Strategic Reconnaissance / Herbert York and G. Allen Greb -- Nuclear Deterrence and the Military Uses of Space -- Why SDI? / Herbert York and Sanford Lakoff -- Minimum Deterrence -- Nuclear Arms Race: Past, Present, and Future.

From the very start, at the age of twenty-one, Herbert F. York was swept into the century's most daring and dangerous technical achievement, the making of the atomic bomb. Throughout his fifty-year career as scientist and statesman, York has been there - at the center of this formidable and fractious era. His is not a dispassionate scholar's treatise, nor is it a reporter's story clipped from the files. Instead, this is a charged, eye-witness documentary, told in the first person by a principal actor.

York takes us backstage to witness key events of our time: to the Manhattan Project for the birth of the atomic bomb; to Lawrence Livermore where the H-bomb was built; to Washington to eavesdrop on how post-war history was being forged; and to Geneva where he tried to stem the madness.

Along the way, you'll meet some of our greatest heros and villains - Lawrence, Oppenheimer, Weisskopf, Teller, General Groves, President Eisenhower, and a cast of hundreds - friends, colleagues, enemies, who for more than half a century, held the fate of the world in their hands.