Wikipedia Deep Dive

Richard Rhodes

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In 1947, a ten-year-old boy named Richard Rhodes walked into a nightmare. His father had remarried, and his new stepmother turned out to be a monster. She starved him. She exploited him. She abused him in ways that would leave psychological scars for decades. One day, his older brother Stanley had had enough. He walked into a police station and told them everything.

That act of courage saved both boys' lives. They were removed from their father's custody and sent to the Andrew Drumm Institute, a home for orphaned and indigent boys in Independence, Missouri. Technically, Richard and Stanley fit neither category—they had a living father and weren't poor in the traditional sense—but someone made an exception. It turned out to be one of the most consequential decisions in the history of American letters.

Because that traumatized boy from Kansas City would grow up to write what many consider the definitive account of humanity's most terrifying invention: the atomic bomb.

From Abuse to Yale

Richard Lee Rhodes was born on July 4, 1937, in Kansas City, Kansas. His mother died by suicide when he was just thirteen months old, leaving him and his brother to be raised by their father, a railroad boilermaker with only a third-grade education. The abuse that followed the father's remarriage lasted until Stanley's intervention.

At the Drumm Institute, something remarkable happened. Instead of being destroyed by his childhood, Rhodes was transformed. He found stability. He found education. He found a path forward.

He would later write about these years in a memoir called A Hole in the World, confronting the trauma directly rather than burying it. In 1991, he joined the board of trustees at Drumm—the institution that had taken him in as a desperate child now benefiting from his guidance as a successful adult. The place still operates today, now accepting both boys and girls.

Both Rhodes brothers graduated from high school. Richard won a full scholarship to Yale University, where he graduated with honors in 1959 as a member of the Manuscript Society. The boy who had been starved by his stepmother had become an Ivy League graduate with the world before him.

The Book That Changed Everything

In 1986, Rhodes published a 900-page book called The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It would win the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. It would sell hundreds of thousands of copies in English and be translated into more than a dozen languages. It would become the standard reference work on one of the most significant technological achievements—and moral catastrophes—in human history.

But what makes the book special isn't just its commercial success or its awards. It's that Rhodes managed to write a narrative history that satisfies both professional historians and the actual scientists who built the bomb.

Isidor Rabi won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on nuclear magnetic resonance. He was there at the dawn of the atomic age, one of the key figures in the development of radar and a close colleague of Robert Oppenheimer. When he read Rhodes's book, he called it "an epic worthy of Milton." He said he had never seen the whole story "put down with such elegance and gusto and in such revealing detail and simple language which carries the reader through wonderful and profound scientific discoveries and their application."

That's an extraordinary endorsement. Milton wrote Paradise Lost, arguably the greatest epic poem in the English language, about the fall of humanity. Rabi was saying that Rhodes had written something comparable about humanity's acquisition of godlike power—the ability to destroy entire cities in a single flash of light.

A Quartet of Nuclear Books

Rhodes didn't stop with that first atomic book. He went on to write three sequels, creating a comprehensive four-volume history of the nuclear age.

The second volume, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, appeared in 1995. It covered the atomic espionage of World War II—the stories of Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, among others—and the fierce debates over whether the hydrogen bomb should be built at all. The hydrogen bomb, also called the thermonuclear bomb, works on a fundamentally different principle than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. While those bombs released energy through nuclear fission (splitting heavy atoms apart), the hydrogen bomb releases far more energy through nuclear fusion (forcing light atoms together). It's the same process that powers the sun, hence the book's title.

The third volume, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, came out in 2007. It chronicled the buildup of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, with particular focus on the relationship between Mikhail Gorbachev and the Reagan administration. Rhodes even wrote a play based on the historic 1986 meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, where the two leaders came tantalizingly close to agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons.

The fourth and final volume, The Twilight of the Bombs, was published in 2010. It examined the post-Cold War nuclear landscape: the spread of nuclear weapons to new countries (a process called proliferation), the threat of nuclear terrorism, and the prospects for a world without nuclear weapons.

Together, these four books span from the discovery of nuclear fission in the 1930s to the complex nuclear politics of the twenty-first century. They represent perhaps the most ambitious attempt by any single author to chronicle humanity's relationship with its most destructive technology.

The Range of a Polymath

What's remarkable about Rhodes is that nuclear weapons are only part of his story. He has published twenty-three books across an astonishing range of subjects.

Consider Deadly Feasts, published in 1997. It's about transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, which is the technical term for a group of diseases that includes mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. These diseases are caused by prions—misfolded proteins that can somehow "infect" normal proteins and cause them to misfold too. Prions are deeply strange. They're not alive in any conventional sense. They have no DNA or RNA. They're just proteins, yet they can spread disease.

Rhodes traces the history of these conditions back to the Fore people of the New Guinea Eastern Highlands, who practiced ritual cannibalism as part of their mourning ceremonies. They consumed their dead relatives in mortuary feasts, and in doing so, they spread a prion disease called kuru through their population. The book connects this distant tragedy to the modern threat of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which emerged in humans who ate beef contaminated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy—mad cow disease, in common parlance.

Then there's Why They Kill, published in 1999. It examines the work of criminologist Lonnie Athens, who developed a theory he called "violentization" to explain how ordinary people become capable of extreme violence. Athens's ideas were controversial—he argued that violent criminals are made, not born, through a specific process of social development—and Rhodes brought them to a wide audience. The book was later adapted into a documentary film in 2017.

In 2004, Rhodes published a biography of John James Audubon, the French-born American artist who created The Birds of America, one of the most celebrated works of natural history illustration ever produced. Audubon's life-sized watercolors of birds and wildlife, created in the early nineteenth century, remain stunning today. Rhodes followed this with an edited collection of Audubon's letters and writings, The Audubon Reader, in 2006.

Hedy's Folly, from 2011, tells the story of Hedy Lamarr, the Hollywood actress who was once called "the most beautiful woman in the world." But Lamarr was far more than a pretty face. During World War II, she co-invented a frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology designed to prevent the jamming of radio-controlled torpedoes. The idea was that by rapidly switching between frequencies according to a predetermined pattern, a signal would be nearly impossible to intercept or block. The Navy initially dismissed the invention, but the underlying principle later became crucial to modern technologies including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS.

Hell and Good Company, published in 2015, covers the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939. This conflict served as a testing ground for World War II, with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy supporting the nationalist forces of Francisco Franco while the Soviet Union aided the republican government. It was a brutal war that drew international volunteers from around the world and produced some of the century's most powerful art and literature, from Picasso's Guernica to Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Energy and the Human Story

In 2018, Rhodes published Energy: A Human History, tracing the history of human energy use from around 1500 to the present. The book explores how societies have transitioned from one energy source to another—from wood to coal to oil to nuclear—and what those transitions meant for the people who lived through them.

One of the book's central insights is how similar the social, political, and market forces around energy have been across different eras. The debates we have today about transitioning to renewable energy echo debates from centuries past about transitioning to coal. There are always vested interests, always fears about disruption, always skeptics and champions. Understanding that history, Rhodes suggests, is essential to navigating our current energy choices.

This book is particularly interesting in light of his earlier work. In 1993, Rhodes published Nuclear Renewal: Common Sense about Energy, which examined the history of the nuclear power industry in the United States and made the case for nuclear energy's future potential. He has testified before the United States Senate on nuclear energy issues, bringing his decades of research to bear on policy questions.

The Fiction Nobody Knows

Fewer people know that Rhodes is also a novelist. He has published four works of fiction, three of which went out of print. But his first novel, The Ungodly: A Novel of the Donner Party, was reissued by Stanford University Press in 2007.

The Donner Party is one of the most harrowing stories in American history. In 1846, a group of pioneers heading west to California took an untested shortcut that cost them weeks of travel time. They became trapped by early snowfall in the Sierra Nevada mountains and, over the brutal winter that followed, some of the survivors resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. It's a story about human endurance, human folly, and the extremes people will reach when facing death.

Given Rhodes's interest in prion diseases transmitted through cannibalism, and his broader fascination with human violence and survival, it makes sense that this story would have attracted him as a novelist. The Donner Party represents an intersection of his preoccupations: the limits of human civilization, the choices people make under extreme pressure, the thin line between the civilized and the savage.

Recognition and Influence

The honors Rhodes has received reflect the breadth and depth of his work. He has been awarded grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation (often called the "genius grant"), and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, among others. He is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

His personal papers and research materials are housed in the Kansas Collection at the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas. For researchers studying the history of nuclear weapons or any of the other subjects Rhodes has explored, these materials are invaluable primary sources.

He continues to lecture widely on subjects ranging from nuclear history to energy policy. He has appeared in documentaries and television programs, including a 1997 episode of the British documentary series Equinox about Britain's postwar effort to develop its own nuclear weapons after collaboration with the United States was cut off by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (often called the McMahon Act).

The Boy Who Became a Chronicler

There's something almost mythic about Rhodes's trajectory. A child so abused that his brother had to report their stepmother to the police. A boy who found refuge in an institution for orphans and indigent children, even though he technically qualified as neither. A young man who earned his way to Yale on a full scholarship. An adult who would go on to write the definitive account of the most destructive weapon ever created.

Perhaps it's not surprising that someone who experienced such darkness in childhood would be drawn to examine darkness on a civilizational scale. The atomic bomb is, in a sense, the ultimate expression of humanity's capacity for destruction—and also of its capacity for knowledge, for organization, for the solving of seemingly impossible problems. Rhodes has spent his career examining both sides of that equation.

He is now in his late eighties. He lives in California with his second wife, Ginger Rhodes, with whom he co-authored a book about overcoming childhood abuse. He has two children and grandchildren. The traumatized boy from Kansas City has become an elder statesman of American letters, someone who has shaped how we understand some of the most important developments of the twentieth century.

His most recent book, Scientist: E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature, was published in 2021. Wilson was a pioneering biologist who studied ants and developed influential theories about the evolution of social behavior. That Rhodes would turn his attention to a naturalist and evolutionary thinker suggests that his curiosity remains as wide-ranging as ever, still seeking to understand how the world works and how to explain it to others.

For anyone interested in nuclear history, Rhodes's quartet of atomic books remains essential reading. But his broader body of work demonstrates something equally important: that a single curious mind, applied with discipline and craft over decades, can illuminate vast territories of human experience. From the physics of nuclear fission to the neurology of prion diseases to the biography of a Hollywood inventor to the history of energy itself, Rhodes has shown that there are no inherent limits to what one writer can explore.

The ten-year-old who walked into that nightmare somehow emerged not broken but determined to understand. That determination has given us some of the most important works of narrative nonfiction of our time.