1. David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 220.

2. Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953–1961: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), ch. 1.

3. Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953–1961, pp. 23–65 (“national importance”), (“Project Wheaties”); Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 339 (“scare the country”); Robert Ferrell, ed., The Eisenhower Diaries (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), p. 234 (“racing towards catastrophe”); Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, 470th Plenary Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, December 8, 1953 (“Peaceful power”).

4. Jimmy Carter, White House Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 28 (“Widely considered”).

5. Hyman Rickover, No Holds Barred: The Final Congressional Testimony of Admiral Hyman Rickover (Washington, DC: Center for Study of Responsive Law, 1982), p. 78 (“coincidence”).

6. Interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover, 60 Minutes, CBS, December 1984 (“stay alive”); Francis Duncan, Rickover: The Struggle for Excellence (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001), chs. 1–3.

7. Duncan, Rickover, p. 83 (“foremost engineers”); interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover, 60 Minutes, CBS, December 1984 (“get things done”).

8. Hyman Rickover, testimony, Joint Economic Committee, U. S. Congress, January 31, 1982.

9. Duncan, Rickover, p. 143 (“unknown to industry”).

10. Interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover, 60 Minutes, CBS, December 1984.

11. Jimmy Carter, Why Not the Best? (New York: Bantam Books, 1976).

12. Duncan, Rickover, pp. 2, 157–58; Time, January 11, 1954; William Anderson, Nautilus 90 North (New York: World Publishing Corp, 1959), p. 203.

13. Robert Darst, Smokestack Diplomacy: Cooperation and Conflict in East-West Environmental Politics (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001), pp. 138–39.

14. Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953–1961, pp. 192–95; Time, November 2, 1953; New York Times Magazine, December 20, 1953; The New York Times, September 17, 1954 (“too cheap to meter”).

15. Duncan, Rickover, p. 2 (“first full-scale”); Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953–1961, p. 421.

16. Irving C. Bupp and Jean-Claude Derian, Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 50 (“cheapest of all”).

17. Bupp and Derian, Light Water, ch. 4, including p. 82 (“traumatic”).

18. Daniel Yergin, “The Terrifying Prospect: Atomic Bombs Everywhere,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1977, p. 47.

19. Interview with George Kistiakowsky.

20. Bupp and Derian, Light Water, p. 122 (“copious amounts”); Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, October 1979.

21. Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island; The New York Times, April 2, 1979; Time, April 9, 1979.

22. Letter from H. G. Rickover to President Jimmy Carter, December 1, 1979, staff officer, office to the senator, Box 158, Folder 12/5/79, Canton Library.

23. Interview with Jean Blancard; Bupp and Derian, Light Water, pp. 105–11.

24. Philippe de Ladoucette to author.

25. Time, May 26, 1986.

26. Philippe de Ladoucette to author.

27. Masahisa Naitoh to author.