FISSION, FUSION AND SPIES: A LIFE IN THEORETICAL PHYSICS

This book relates the life, education and experiences of a Minnesotan who fell in love with physics early in life, went to Princeton and was educated by former students of Enrico Fermi and others who had worked on the development of nuclear weapons. He then spent a year in Moscow participating in the first year of the scientific exchange program initiated by Kennedy and Kruschev, where he encountered an American defector and had other interesting experiences with Russians and with the KGB. He ended up working at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, funded by the government for the development of nuclear fusion for energy production.

Contents:

• Growing Up in Edina
• Graduate School at Princeton
• The Soviet Union
• East Berlin
• Trieste
• UCLA
• Back to Princeton
• Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
• Climbing
• Collaborators from Abroad
• Fusion: When
• Some Philosophy
• Martial Arts
• Email with Ilya
• Minnesota
• Family History
• Back Matter

Readership: This book is a popular level book targetting the general public with strong interest in the history of the development of nuclear weapons and also the Cold War.

Roscoe B White was raised in Minnesota and obtained his bachelor's degree in physics with high honors from the University of Minnesota in 1959. He completed a PhD in Physics at Princeton University, then spending one year at the Lebedev Institute in Moscow on the first year of the Academy of Science exchange program. After two years at the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste and six years teaching at UCLA he returned to Princeton, spending 47 years as a theoretical physicist at the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, working on controlled thermonuclear fusion for energy production, where he was head of the Theory Division. He is now a senior researcher in retirement. He has over 350 publications.