Nuclear History

In his shocking and revelatory new work, celebrated journalist William Langewiesche investigates the burgeoning threat of nuclear-weapons production and the inexorable drift of nuclear-weapons technology from the hands of the rich into the hands of the poor. As more unstable and undeveloped nations acquire the ultimate arms, the stakes of state-sponsored nuclear activity have soared to frightening heights. Even more disturbing is the likelihood of such weapons being used by guerrilla non-state terrorists.

Robert Oppenheimer had a lot resting on his shoulders. During the Second World War, he was tasked with directing the development of the world’s first nuclear arsenal. Known as the Manhattan Project, this super-secretive wartime project had the stoic visage of Oppenheimer overseeing the greatest experiment ever conducted by humankind. Much had happened in Oppenheimer’s life to lead him to this point, and much would subsequently take place after, but this moment was indeed the pinnacle of his career and his life.

This landmark history of nuclear power is perfectly timed for today, when Americans are gravely concerned with nuclear terrorism, and a nuclear renaissance is seen as a possible solution to global warming. Few have truly come to terms with the complexities of an issue which may determine the future of the planet. Nuclear weapons, it was once hoped, would bring wars to a close; instead, they spurred a massive arms race that has recently expanded to include North Korea and Iran.

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.

The decisions to trust—or not—are pervasive throughout our everyday lives. Whether or not we trust others, for example, depends on many factors, and they all have a history. The battle to trust or mistrust, as experienced at the personal, political and cultural levels, are revealed in this well-documented story. This book illuminates the nature of trust, a deeply abstract and critically important concept.

Paveway, the first "smart" bomb, was created to be a more precise and ostensibly humane weapon, reducing civilian casualties. The true impact of the bomb, however, is ever more complex and unpredictable. In The Warhead, Jeffrey Stern tells the story of Paveway through the lives of seven interconnected stories. They're stories of Nazis, Kennedys, Operation Paperclip, and Walt Disney; of the Apollo mission and the space shuttle Challenger disaster.

During the 1950s, the big fear was nuclear war. From the Soviet Union's perspective, having a communist stronghold so close to the American border was a dream come true. By the early 1960s, there was a strong undercurrent of tension between the Americans and the Soviets. Aside from the disastrous loss of life and dignity at the Bay of Pigs, something else happened. The line was firmly drawn in the sand. The world was on the brink of nuclear war.

Between 1961 and 1967 the United States Air Force buried 1,000 Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles in pastures across the Great Plains. The Missile Next Door tells the story of how rural Americans of all political stripes were drafted to fight the Cold War by living with nuclear missiles in their backyards - and what that story tells us about enduring political divides and the persistence of defense spending. By scattering the missiles in out-of-the-way places, the Defense Department kept the chilling calculus of Cold War nuclear strategy out of view.

Gavin reassesses the strategy of flexible response, the influence of nuclear weapons during the Berlin Crisis, the origins of and motivations for US nuclear nonproliferation policy, and how to assess the nuclear dangers we face today. Archival evidence makes it clear that decision makers were more concerned about underlying geopolitical questions than about the strategic dynamic between two nuclear superpowers.

The Cold War between the United States of America and the Soviet Union lasted for more than 40 years. In general, this was a war of spies and subterfuge, of covert action and espionage. There was always a danger, however, that an error of judgment on either side could suddenly cause the Cold War to turn red-hot with an exchange of nuclear weapons. On many occasions, tensions between the countries increased, but the prospect of all-out nuclear war between America and Russia was never closer than during a two-week period in October of 1962.

Douglas Webster was a young pilot from Ohio, newly married and with 17 combat missions under his belt. On December 5, 1965 he strapped into an A-4 Skyhawk bomber for a routine weapons loading drill and simulated mission. After mishandling the maneuver, the plane and its pilot sunk to the bottom of the South China Sea, along with a live B43 one-megaton thermonuclear bomb. A cover-up mission began.

From the pioneers of Los Alamos who got up close and personal with the cores of atomic bombs, to the hapless engineers in Soviet fuel-processing plants who unwittingly mixed up a disaster in a bucket, and from the terrifying impact of a tsunami at Fukushima to the mystery of the recent Russian incident, Meltdown explores the past and future of this extraordinary and potentially lethal source of infinite power

After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between 31 and 54 people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone.

On July 16, 1945, just weeks before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought about the surrender of Japan and the end of WWII, the US unleashed the world's first atomic bomb at the Trinity testing site located in the remote Tularosa Valley in New Mexico. In The First Atomic Bomb Janet Farrell Brodie explores the history of the Trinity test and those whose contributions have rarely been discussed—the men and women who constructed, served, and witnessed the first test—as well as the downwinders who suffered the consequences of radiation.

The story of the twentieth century is largely the story of the power of science and technology. Within that story is the incredible tale of the human conflict between Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller—the scientists most responsible for the advent of weapons of mass destruction. How did science—and its practitioners—enlisted in the service of the state during the Second World War, become a slave to its patron during the Cold War?

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.

Why did the US intelligence services fail so spectacularly to know about the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities following World War II? As Vince Houghton, historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, shows us, that disastrous failure came just a few years after the Manhattan Project's intelligence team had penetrated the Third Reich and knew every detail of the Nazi's plan for an atomic bomb. What changed and what went wrong?

Tim Koeth peered into the crumpled brown paper bag; inside was a surprisingly heavy black metal cube. He recognized the mysterious object instantly—he had one just like it sitting on his desk at home. It was uranium metal, taken from the nuclear reactor that Nazi scientists had tried—and failed—to build at the end of World War II. This unexpected gift, wrapped in a piece of paper inscribed with a few cryptic but crucial lines, would launch Koeth, a nuclear physicist and professor, and his colleague Miriam Hiebert, a cultural heritage scientist, on an odyssey to trace the tale of these cubes.

Oorlog is een bijzonder en paradoxaal fenomeen. Het roept tegelijk walging en fascinatie op. Oorlog was een inspiratiebron voor de beste wereldliteratuur én voor de meest afschuwelijke gruweldaden. Eén ding is duidelijk: oorlog is een belangrijke 'vormende' kracht in de geschiedenis. Zo zag de landkaart van Europa er na de Eerste Wereldoorlog totaal anders uit dan ervoor. Complete keizerrijken verdwenen en nieuwe staten werden gevormd. Na 1945 zorgden koloniale en revolutionaire oorlogen voor een geheel andere wereldkaart.

Nuclear Russia probes the juncture of history of science and technology, political and cultural history, and environmental history. It considers the atom in Russian society as a reflection of Leninist technological utopianism, Cold War imperatives, scientific hubris, public acceptance, and a state desire to conquer nature. Furthermore the audiobook examines the vital – and perhaps unexpected – significance of ethnicity and gender in nuclear history by looking at how Kazakhs and Nenets lost their homelands and their health in Russia in the wake of nuclear testing.