Richard Rhodes

Biography

American writer and historian, born in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1937, and formerly a visiting professor at Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation. The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the 1987 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is regarded as an authoritative account of nuclear weapons history and twentieth-century physics. He went on to write Dark Sun, Arsenals of Folly and The Twilight of the Bombs, forming a four-volume history of nuclear weapons. Not trained as a scientist, he works chiefly from oral histories and biographical material, and historians have criticised his relative neglect of institutional and industrial analysis.