Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People

Description

Welcome to Livermore, California, 1983—a world of Cold War politics, swimming pools, crushy love, and genuine loss.

Growing up in sleepy suburbia surrounded by nuclear scientists, teenage Gene Harland witnesses firsthand the culture of arms development. President Reagan calls on the scientists of Livermore to develop a defense system protecting the United States from nuclear missile attack, “a shield not a sword.”

Skeptical seventeen-year-old Gene sets out to wage his own kind of Cold War. By the conclusion, Gene learns what he stands to lose by alienating himself from the world . . . and what he stands to lose by engaging with it.