The good servant

Janet Bailey's The Good Servant: Making Peace with the Bomb at Los Alamos tells, for the first time, the story of what the end of the Cold War means to the brilliant men and women of Los Alamos. Many in this select group of scientists believe that they, as much as anyone, have kept us all safe for the last half century, and that they, more than anyone, are the unsung heroes who won the Cold War. Bailey, who was there for the last underground test, who watched as the bomb assembly plant began disassembling the bombs that it had put together, follows these scientists as they begin to try to find where their talents, intelligence, and dreams fit into the new world order. She is there as a group of Russian and American bomb builders try to take what they've learned from the hydrogen bomb to create a source of fusion power. She shows us how one of the men who ran the underground tests uses his knowledge of the earth to try to extract electrical power from the ground beneath our feet. She takes us to a cave beneath a Russian mountain as a Russian/American team searches through a lake of gray sludge for the elusive particle that may explain the way the universe works. The Good Servant captures a historic moment, the moment when the men and women who created the most destructive forces ever to exist on this planet were told to study war no more, to turn their talents to building this new world. In doing so, it shows us what they've lost and what we've gained, and, in the process, offers us a message of hope and possibility.