Michaela Sue

The Bomb: a Life by Scottish author Gerard J. DeGroot, is not, overall, a funny book. One would not expect it to be, given that the subject is nuclear weapons. It does, nonetheless, have some funny passages. Like this one:

The first bona fide thermonuclear device was born in 1952. It was not a bomb in the conventional sense but more like a factory for producing an explosion. Nicknamed ‘Mike’, it weighed 65 tonnes and was two storeys tall. Most of its bulk was devoted to the refrigeration unit needed to keep the thermonuclear fuel at -250 degrees centigrade. Anyone familiar with American refrigerators should not be surprised at its dimensions nor at the capacity of the US to build it.