I’m two years behind on this but preeminent historian Richard Rhodes has lodged his papers with the University of Kansas. What a bounty (at least as far as I can judge without traveling to the university and going through the papers)! There are 145 boxes of material, including a hundred interview audio tapes.
For anyone interested in atomic/nuclear issues, Richard Rhodes wrote THE core nuclear history quartet: The Making of the Atomic Bomb; Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb; Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race; and The Twilight of the Bombs: New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons. I don’t know how much of his collection pertains to those four books (hey, he wrote 26 books!), but my first thought on finding out about what sits on those shelves in Kansas was this: I wish I could go there!
I’m not going to go there but someone else must. Nuclear history is way underdone. We need young historians to revisit what’s already been done, to refresh the work, to pursue “the real truth.” Someone needs to head there soon, to soak in what this remarkable man pursued, and to use that to springboard new knowledge and understanding.