Melissa Archibald did most of the research for this book while in Moscow, Russia, supported by a National Security Education Program (NSEP) David L. Boren Scholarship. She was then a student in Arizona State University''s Barrett Honors College. We have here an adaptation of her 2007 undergraduate honors thesis published by the Institute for Issues in the History of Science of Tempe, Arizona and Perm, Russian Federation in 2008 (124 pp. including a bibliography, two photos and a map, ISBN 978-1-4357-1542-4--available at http://www.lulu.com/content/2318070). The "issue in the history of science" that is patent here is that of nuclear non-proliferation. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian government of President Boris Yeltsin inherited the problem of what to do with the former Soviet nuclear armaments industry and its thousands of trained scientists and technicians. The Russian government was not financially able, during the time of its transition to a democratic form of capitalism, to afford the monumental task of retraining of these scientists and technicians so that economic need would not force them to sell either their expertise or their accessed componentry to rogue states and/or terrorist organizations, thus threatening the security of the entire world. So, a number of international agencies were formed by the United States, the Countries of the European Union, and the United Nations to aid the Russians in this retraining. In the foreword to Archibald''s work, Professors Valentin F.
Olontsev and Lee B. Croft write about the Russians'' indigenous efforts to deal with the problem of their nuclear bomb industry in "The Legacy of ''The Beard'': Igor V. Kurchatov and the Russian Nuclear Bombs." But Archibald''s main text treats the international efforts. In this book the reader learns of the vast and terrible effort of Josef Stalin and his henchman Lavrentii Beria to exploit the labor of German POW''s and of GULAG prisoners to mine the needed uranium, and to demand progress from Igor Kurchatov and his elite team of scientists in a number of hidden cities to design, test, and produce first atomic bombs, then hydrogen bombs. After the death of Stalin and Beria, many of the key scientists, including Kurchatov, became disillusioned with the human and environmental consequences of this testing and production of weapons, wanting to focus their scientific efforts instead on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. But only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union has such a refocusing become increasingly possible, thanks to the troubled, partially effective, international cooperation. Archibald gives a concise analysis of the international efforts, detailing the intercultural and political problems associated with them.