Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy (repost)
Frank Close and F. E. Close, "Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy"
English | ISBN: 0465069983 | 2015 | 400 pages | PDF | 2 MB
English | ISBN: 0465069983 | 2015 | 400 pages | PDF | 2 MB
The memo landed on Kim Philby's desk in Washington, DC, in July 1950. Three months later, Bruno Pontecorvo, a physicist at Harwell, Britain's atomic energy lab, disappeared without a trace. When he re-surfaced six years later, he was on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
One of the most brilliant scientists of his generation, Pontecorvo was privy to many secrets: he had worked on the Anglo-Canadian arm of the Manhattan Project, and quietly discovered a way to find the uranium coveted by nuclear powers. Yet when he disappeared MI5 insisted he was not a threat. Now, based on unprecedented access to archives, letters, surviving family members and scientists, award-winning writer and physics professor Frank Close pieces together an answer to whether Pontecorvo's defection did indeed bring an end to a life of spycraft, and exposes the truth about a man irrevocably marked by the advent of the atomic age and the Cold War.