Nuclear History

After the Soviet Union proved to the United States that it possessed an operational intercontinental ballistic missile with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the world watched anxiously as the two superpowers engaged in a game of nuclear one-upmanship. Amid this rising tension, eccentric physicist Nicholas Christofilos brought forth an outlandish, albeit ingenious, idea to defend the US from a Soviet attack: detonating nuclear warheads in space to create an artificial radiation belt that would fry incoming ICBMs. Known as Operation Argus, this plan is the most secret and riskiest experiment in history, and classified details of these nuclear tests have been long obscured.

After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grandfather's role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project. Dr. Nolan, it turned out, had been a significant figure.

This work, The Sword of Damocles: Our Nuclear Age, deals with our history as well as today's headlines. I had the opportunity to study that precarious period in a unique way. As a museum director with a forty-year career behind me, I met and worked with some of the leaders in the field of nuclear weapons testing.

In this groundbreaking look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Sherwin not only gives us a riveting sometimes hour-by-hour explanation of the crisis itself, but also explores the origins, scope, and consequences of the evolving place of nuclear weapons in the post-World War II world. Mining new sources and materials, and going far beyond the scope of earlier works on this critical face-off between the United States and the Soviet Union — triggered when Khrushchev began installing missiles in Cuba at Castro's behest....

In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky, and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love.

In a South American jungle, perched precariously above a raging river, the secret detonator for a WW2 Nazi nuclear weapon lies undisturbed inside a long lost airplane. Its discovery ignites a race to grab the bomb and cover up another terrible secret: a written accord giving Europe to Hitler. A treaty that would tear apart the NATO Alliance. The CIA recruits salvage expert Morgan Fox to recover the pilot, the plane and the bomb. But a rogue CIA operative threatens to expose everything, sell the treaty, destabilize the region and all of NATO. Will Morgan and his team recover the plane in ...

An epic story of science and technology at the very limits of human understanding: the monumental race to build the first atomic weapons.

Rich in personality, action, confrontation, and deception, The First War of Physics is the first fully realized popular account of the race to build humankind's most destructive weapon. The book draws on declassified material, such as MI6's Farm Hall transcripts, coded Soviet messages cracked by American cryptographers in the Venona project, and interpretations by Russian scholars of documents from the Soviet archives.

Just days after the United States decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. But even before the surrender, the US government and military had begun a secret propaganda and information suppression campaign to hide the devastating nature of these experimental weapons. The cover-up intensified as Occupation forces closed the atomic cities to Allied reporters, preventing leaks about the horrific long-term effects of radiation that would kill thousands during the months after the blast.

In this debut history from one of America's most influential political journalists, Bret Baier casts the three days between Dwight Eisenhower's prophetic "farewell address" on the evening of January 17, 1961, and his successor John F. Kennedy's inauguration on the afternoon of January 20 as the final mission of one of modern America's greatest leaders.

Anna Fifield reconstructs Kim's past and present with exclusive access to sources near him and brings her unique understanding to explain the dynastic mission of the Kim family in North Korea. The archaic notion of despotic family rule matches the almost medieval hardship the country has suffered under the Kims. Few people thought that a young, untested, unhealthy, Swiss-educated basketball fanatic could hold together a country that should have fallen apart years ago. But Kim Jong Un has not just survived, he has thrived.

Across the Western alliance, liberal politicians and pundits are calling for renewed diplomatic engagement with Iran, convinced that Tehran will respond to reason and halt its nuclear weapons program. Yet, according to best-selling author and former U.N. ambassador Dore Gold, countries have repeatedly tried diplomatic talks and utterly failed.

On September 6, 2007, shortly after midnight, Israeli fighters advanced on Deir ez-Zour in Syria. Israel often flew into Syria as a warning to President Bashar al-Assad. But this time, there was no warning and no explanation. This was a covert operation, with one goal: to destroy a nuclear reactor being built by North Korea under a tight veil of secrecy in the Syrian desert. Shadow Strike tells, for the first time, the story of the espionage, military might and psychological warfare behind Israel’s operation to stop one of the greatest known acts of nuclear proliferation.

In Three Days in Moscow, Baier explores the dramatic endgame of America’s long struggle with the Soviet Union and President Ronald Reagan’s central role in shaping the world we live in today. On May 31, 1988, Reagan stood on Russian soil and addressed a packed audience at Moscow State University, delivering a remarkable - yet now largely forgotten - speech that capped his first visit to the Soviet capital.

Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster. In the 30 years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers not only its own citizens but all of humanity.

The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness. Dr. Hachiya's compelling diary was originally published by the UNC Press in 1955, with the help of Dr. Warner Wells of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

From Neil Sheehan, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic A Bright Shining Lie, comes this long-awaited, magnificent epic. Here is the never-before-told story of the nuclear arms race that changed history - and of the visionary American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who led the high-stakes effort. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War is a masterly work about Schriever’s quests to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear superiority, to penetrate and exploit space for America, and to build the first weapons meant to deter an atomic holocaust.

For more than half a century, the United States has been pursuing a grand imperial strategy with the aim of staking out the globe. Our leaders have shown themselves willing, as in the Cuban missile crisis, to follow the dream of dominance no matter how high the risks. Now the Bush administration is intensifying this process, driving us toward the final frontiers of imperial control, toward a choice between the prerogatives of power and a livable Earth.

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.

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the most perilous event in history, when mankind faced a looming nuclear collision between the United States and Soviet Union. During those weeks, the world gazed into the abyss of potential annihilation. Max Hastings’s graphic new history tells the story from the viewpoints of national leaders, Russian officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British disarmers.

What draws our species to war? What makes us see violence as a kind of sacred duty, or a ritual that boys must undergo to "become" men? Newly reissued, Blood Rites takes listeners on an original journey from the elaborate human sacrifices of the ancient world to the carnage and holocaust of 20th-century "total war." Ehrenreich sifts deftly through the fragile records of prehistory and discovers the wellspring of war in an unexpected place - not in a "killer instinct" unique to the males of our species, but in the blood rites early humans performed.