Nuclear History

On September 6, 1945, less than a month after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, became the first free Westerner to enter the devastated city. Going into the hospitals and consulting the doctors of the bomb's victims, Weller was the first to document its unprecedented long-range medical effects. He also became the first to enter the nearby Allied POW camps, which rivaled those of the Nazis for cruelty and bested them for death count.

The Dead Hand is the suspense-filled story of the people who sought to brake the speeding locomotive of the arms race, then rushed to secure the nuclear and biological weapons left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union - a dangerous legacy that haunts us even today. The Cold War was an epoch of massive overkill. In the last half of the 20th century the two superpowers had perfected the science of mass destruction and possessed nuclear weapons with the combined power of a million Hiroshimas.

America's Nuclear Wastelands presents an expert, yet straightforward overview of this complex topic, including nuclear weapons history and contamination issues. The author, a government consultant with a long career in Pacific Northwest nuclear waste issues, also explores the current institutional and political environment, demonstrating the critical role of public participation for past and future generations.

Perhaps the first environmental engineer at Hanford, Melvin R. Adams spent 24 years on its 586 square miles of desert terrain. His thoughtful vignettes recall challenges and sites he worked on or found personally intriguing - like the 216-U-pond, contaminated with plutonium longer than any other place in the world.

North Korea's bizarre feuds with the rest of the world have been turned into comedy gold time and time again, perhaps because their endless threats seem so far removed from reality. But just how serious is the threat of nuclear war against North Korea? North Korea’s Nuclear Program: The History of the Hermit Kingdom’s Development of Nuclear Weapons looks at how North Korea has developed and tested destructive nuclear weapons over the past several decades.

Throughout the world, oppressive regimes are being uprooted and replaced by budding democracies, but one exception remains: The People's Republic of North Korea. The Kim family has clung to power for three generations by silencing dissidents, ruling with an iron fist, and holding its neighbors hostage with threats of war. Under the leadership of Kim Jong Un, North Korea has come closer than ever to creating a viable nuclear arsenal, but widespread famine and growing resistance are weakening his regime's stability.

The End of Victory recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war—how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy.

Prepare for the unthinkable with "Nuclear Crash Survival" by Dr. James J. Archer. This ultimate guide equips you with essential survival skills and knowledge to not only survive but thrive amidst nuclear disasters and other 21st-century catastrophes. From understanding the mechanics of nuclear explosions to implementing comprehensive preparation plans, this indispensable manual provides vital information for navigating the aftermath of an atomic bomb or nuclear attack.

Uranprojekt: The History and Legacy of Nazi Germany’s Nuclear Weapons Program During World War II examines the Nazis’ race to reach the ultimate goal from 1939-45, how they went about their objectives, and why they failed. You will learn about Nazi Germany’s nuclear weapons program like never before.

This book tells the story of the 99 men who were serving on the USS Scorpion on May 22, 1968, the fateful day the submarine is believed to have sank. It appears that the crew members died quickly, but however it happened, the grief experienced by their family members dragged on for decades, exacerbated both by the Navy's lack of information about the submarine's final moments and the government's unwillingness to share what little knowledge it had.

Uranium is best known for the destructive power of the atom bombs, which ushered in the nuclear era at the end of World War II, but given the effectiveness of nuclear power, plants like those at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania were constructed to generate energy for Americans during the second half of the 20th century. While nuclear power plants were previously not an option and thus opened the door to new, more efficient, and more affordable forms of energy for domestic consumption, the use of nuclear energy understandably unnerved people.

Uranium is best known for the destructive power of the atom bombs, which ushered in the nuclear era at the end of World War II, but given the effectiveness of nuclear power, nuclear power plants were constructed around the developed world during the second half of the 20th century. While nuclear power plants were previously not an option and thus opened the door to new, more efficient, and more affordable forms of energy for domestic consumption, the use of nuclear energy understandably unnerved people living during the Cold War and amid ongoing nuclear detonations.

On July 21, 2003, in a speech urging Middle Eastern governments to band together and “[fight] terrorism in all its forms”, President George W. Bush had declared that terrorism was fueling the governments of Syria and Iran. About two years later, he reiterated the bold statement in his State of the Union address, lambasting Iran as the world's “primary state sponsor of terror”. These hostile sentiments toward Iran only continued to escalate.

As award-winning biographer and science writer Graham Farmelo describes in Churchill's Bomb, the British set out to investigate the possibility of building nuclear weapons before their American colleagues. But when scientists in Britain first discovered a way to build an atomic bomb, Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not make the most of his country's lead and was slow to realize the bomb's strategic implications.

Nuclear power once promised to be the solution to the world's energy crisis, but that all changed in the late twentieth century after multiple high-profile accidents and meltdowns. Power plant workers, finding themselves the subject of public opposition, became leery of reporters. But one plant in Zion, Illinois, allowed unrestricted access to one journalist: the Chicago Tribune's Casey Bukro. Bukro spent two years inside the Zion nuclear plant, interviewing employees, witnessing high-risk maintenance procedures, and watching the radiation exposure counter on his own dosimeter tick up and up.

In Leveraging Latency, Tristan A. Volpe argues that having greater capacity to build weaponry doesn't translate to greater coercive advantage. Volpe finds that there is a trade-off between threatening proliferation and promising nuclear restraint. States need just enough bomb-making capacity to threaten proliferation, but not so much that it becomes too difficult for them to offer nonproliferation assurances. The boundaries of this sweet spot align with the capacity to produce the fissile material at the heart of an atomic weapon.

As Sarah E. Robey shows in Atomic Americans, people negotiated the contours of nuclear citizenship through overlapping public discussions about survival. Policymakers and citizens disagreed about the scale of civil defense programs and other public safety measures. As the public learned more about the dangers of nuclear fallout, critics articulated concerns about whether the federal government was operating in its citizens' best interests.

Tens of millions died during World War II as the warring powers raced to create the best fighter planes, tanks, and guns, and eventually that race extended to bombs which carried enough power to destroy civilization itself. While the war raged in Europe and the Pacific, a dream team of Nobel Laureates was working on the Manhattan Project, a program kept so secret that Vice President Harry Truman didn’t know about it until he took the presidency after FDR’s death in April 1945.

Before the Second World War, military conflicts were fought under orthodox conditions, usually termed “conventional warfare”, but several innovations had significantly changed combat, leading inextricably to the race for a nuclear weapon in the 1930s and 1940s. Conflicts had been fought by armies on horseback with guns of varying sophistication since the 16th century, but mechanized warfare and machine guns changed this calculus and set the stage for future combat by the end of World War I.

Nominado al "Premio Nacional Kyorlenko Heorhij Stepanovych 2019" y ganador del "Mejor informe periodístico sobre el desastre de Chernobyl" nombrado por Kyiv Today, esta serie de libros revela los eventos del peor accidente nuclear, también representado en la mundialmente famosa serie de TV de drama Chernobyl 2019, con detalles más profundos.