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

by Joseph Albright

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081292861X
• ISBN13: 9780812928617
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
• Length: 399 Pages
• Weight: 1.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.6" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Giving Stalin The Bomb.

A must read to help you understand why an American liberal would help Stalin build atomic weapons. The most fascinating chapter deals with him sitting in England, where he went to avoid prosecution, during the Cuban missle crisis and being deathly afraid he'd made a huge mistake.

SUBJECT WAS SCUM OF THE EARTH

But this is an excellent book, save for Madeleine Albright's ex-hubby's studied "objectivity"... To understand the motivation of those Americans who chose to betray their country for the sake of one of the 20th century's worst monsters, Uncle Joe Stalin, is almost unexplainable. Yet Joe Albright and Marcia Kunstel, his (current) wife do an admirable job in explaining why a toady, a pathetic self-righteous "intellectual" by the name of Ted Hall chose to turn over the secrets of Los Alamos and the Nagasaki A-bomb to the Soviet Union. In doing so, the Albrights also uncover the story of the parallel Rosenberg spy ring, the one headed by Lincoln Brigade veteran Morris Cohen. Cohen and his wife, two of the most despicable people to ever be born in this country, chose a creed no better than Nazism to betray both their country and their people - the Jews of America, as did Hall. Cohen, who truly believed that the future of the world was better off in the hands of Stalin, went to Spain to fight Fascism but ended up becoming a Fascist himself. Wounded in action, he was co-opted to Soviet Intelligence along with several other Lincoln brigaders. The Hitler-Stalin Pact never fazed him, nor Hall, and like the Rosenbergs they didn't care about betraying the America that ensured their freedoms and those of their families. Indeed, when the Rosenbergs were arrested, Cohen and his equally obnoxious wife fled to their beloved Russia. The justification? According the commentary attributed to both Hall and the late, unlamented Cohen scum, they felt that with the Soviet Union also possessing the A-Bomb it would be prevent an aggressive Capitalist America from pre-empting nuclear war on both the Soviet Union and China. Indeed, Hall, the scientist who handed over the secrets to the Cohens, was passionate in his belief that he prevented the dropping of the bomb on China in 1949. Ironically, Cohen's buddy in the Lincoln brigade, one Jack Bjoze, who is also quoted in this book, also feels the same way. Of course Mao was such a benevolent agarian reformer. The book is a well-written read, but one gets sickened when confronted with the depravity and moral cowardice of a weasel like Hall and by his traitor pal Cohen who put Stalin above all including Washington, Lincoln, and everything good about America. Unlike the majority of the Lincolns who later left the Party or at least were honest and open about their Communist affiliations, Cohen comes across as a stool pigeon, a toady, and a servile lackey of Stalin. Ironically, and outrageously, the so-called Democrat Boris Yeltsin named Soviet spy Cohen, before he passed on - too late for the good of the world - a hero of Russia. So much for Yeltsin being America's friend. The Albrights can also be faulted for not portraying Ted Hall and his friends as what they were - they prefer objectivity and letting history decide, in effect giving Hall a pass. In reading "Bombshell" one fervently wishes that Hall and the Cohens were dea

The hidden Los Alamos mole at the onset of proliferation

Beyond Fuchs et al, there had always been suspicions of an extra spy. Now we know. This is the gripping account of Ted Hall,code name Mlad, a teenage whiz kid who suddenly found himself at Los Alamos, savy enough to be at the dead center of bomb calculations, and deciding for idealistic reasons, refusing all payment, to share the secret of the atomic weapon with the Russians. Soon the a virtually complete description of how to construct a weapon is in the hands of the Communists. It is interesting that the original communication was decoded in the late forties, and that he was almost caught, but simply slipped through, until the opening of the archives after 1989.

Meet the other main KGB source at Los Alamos.

4/28/99: Almost all histories of the Manhattan Project mention the quiet German refugee scientist, Klaus Fuchs, code name Charlz, who gave the Soviet Union a good working blueprint of the Nagasaki bomb. But a couple of weeks before Harry Gold picked up Fuch's information, KGB courier Lona Cohen met Ted Hall, code name Mlad ('youth'), in Albuquerque, and got an equally revealing description. BOMBSHELL fills in one of the major missing pieces of the puzzle of Soviet Espionage against the Manhatten Project. Now, if we can just find out who code names Pers, Kvant and Nejtron were, and what information Oppenheimer passed... Highly Recommended.

About one fifth of the way through, enjoying the book.

Interesting book, well written. Fascinating. Fills gaps in my appreciation of 20th Century history.

A fascinating expose of cold war origins

What can be said about a man who in his youth followed his conscience, albeit rashly, and betrayed to another country the most devastating secrets of military weaponry the world had ever known? This is a difficult moral question, not easily answered. This book shows the roots of Ted Hall's thought processes, his naturally rebellious nature, and the reasons why he chose to spy against his own country in a time of war. It also shows that he was far from alone in his ultimate decision to do so. There are other questions that are almost as difficult to answer. Why was security ridiculously lax at the Los Alamos facilities? How did Ted Hall and others manage to escape discovery for so long? While one cannot condone what occurred, it is easy to see why intelligent people felt compelled not to allow such potent information to remain the exclusive property of any one country. The aftermath of this information's dissemination may indeed have spared us another world war, but it also foreshadowed the inevitable consequences of the McCarthy witchhunt and an uncontrolled arms race. This is one of the more informative chapters of history at last unconvered.