Richard Rhodes

Richard Rhodes is the author or editor of twenty-three books including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in History; an investigation of the roots of private violence, Why They Kill; a personal memoir, A Hole in the World; a biography, John James Audubon; and four novels. He has received numerous fellowships for research and writing, including grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation Program in International Peace and Security and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT and a host and correspondent for documentaries on public television's Frontline and American Experience series. He is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

A third volume of nuclear history, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, was published in October 2007 by Alfred A. Knopf. A fourth and final volume, The Twilight of the Bombs, is currently in bookstores. With his wife Ginger Rhodes, a clinical psychologist in private practice in San Francisco, he lives near Half Moon Bay, California.

Articles by this Author

That Awful Test in La Jornada Del Muerto, April 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 2

It worked, and, in a few millionths of a second, science became more powerful than all the age-old nation-states

The Toughest Flying in the World, August/September 1986 | Vol. 37, No. 5

These World War II airmen had one of the most dangerous missions of all, piloting unarmed cargo planes over the Hump - the high and treacherous Himalayas.

A Demonstration At Shippingport, June/July 1981 | Vol. 32, No. 4

Coming on Line

“God Pity A One-Dream Man”, June/July 1980 | Vol. 31, No. 4

The Ordeal of Robert Hutchings Goddard

A Plundered Province Revisited, August/September 1978 | Vol. 29, No. 5

The Colonial Status—Past and Present—of the Great American West

The American Farm, February/March 1978 | Vol. 29, No. 2

Still Family, Still the Wonder of the World

The Farther Continent Of James Clyman, December 1978 | Vol. 30, No. 1

“Surveyor, mountain man, soldier, businessman, wanderer, captain of emigrants, farmer…he was himself the westward-moving frontier.”

“I Am Become Death…”, October 1977 | Vol. 28, No. 6

The Agony of J. Robert Oppenheimer

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