The Nuclear Spies

Great read! Absolutely exhaustively researched, it reads like an espionage thriller, but in which the sleuths make their deductions based not on evidence and cold hard facts, but on assumptions that were borne of cultural differences between the West and the Soviet Union, and assumptions that were borne of an unearned regard for German R&D efforts in the face of that country's massive military spending. We have a perfect case of giving too much credit to the Germans, and nowhere near enough credit to the Soviets. Truman himself believed "those Asiatics" (his word for the Soviets) would never be able to produce a nuclear weapon. It's this same mindset that allowed the West to be taken by surprise when the Soviets became the first to launch a manmade satellite, the first to put a man in space, and the first to photograph the so-called "dark side" of the moon. An excellent article I recently read suggests that this locked-down mindset continues today through CIA intelligence estimates of the Soviet, and now Russian, nuclear missile threat. We continue to underestimate what power lies beyond the horizon in the hands of those who would wish to see us most harmed.

Very good book. Four stars.

Interesting background on the race for the nuclear bomb; less detail on the nuclear spies themselves than I would like, but fascinating subject.

The author's painstaking research and attention to detail is obvious in the writing of this book. There were many facts that I only discovered after reading this!

As a fan of espionage fiction, it's always enthralling for me to read about the real spies and intelligence efforts conducted by nations as they attempt to out-wit and out-equip one another. This book recounts the tangled signals that plagued the United States's intelligence collection near the end of World War II, as the US raced to produce a nuclear bomb. Houghton does a great job of following the players on both sides of the war, revealing that science and spying make odd bedfellows, since it was the rare American agent who understood enough physics to actually be able to gauge what information was important and what was not, while the Germans had basically dismissed the importance of developing any nuclear weaponry. With the Soviets, the Americans greatly underestimated a nuclear program's success, leading to a multitude of rationales for why the American spying program failed in that mission. While I wouldn't say that the fact here is stranger than fiction, it's certainly equally fascinating.
I was provided a free e-copy of this book by Netgalley.com in exchange for my honest review.

Historian and curator of what sounds like a fascinating institution, the International Spy Museum, Vince Houghton dives into two topics that have been tackled many times before but perhaps never as comprehensively. He asks, essentially: how did the Allies do so well in understanding the Nazis' atomic bomb efforts in World War II, yet blunder so badly in predicting when the Soviets might test their first nuclear weapon (in case you don't know, the second took place in 1949 and it left the Americans dumbstruck). Both topics are close to my heart, so I devoured "The Nuclear Spies: America's Atomic Intelligence Operation against Hitler and Stalin" with the speed of a Dan Brown romp. Houghton's organization skills and penmanship are exemplary, and the scholarship on display is first rate. "The Nuclear Spies" is modern history as it should be written.