Nuclear Science

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.

A science fiction/fantasy story of a most curious planet far, far away ... with a quite sinister twist.

Acclaimed author Anthony Renfro has a problem. As his fans wait anxiously for his next release, a character he has created tumbles out of the pages of his book and comes to life. With no clear story or plot in Anthony’s head, he must work together with this character in order to find out what story he belongs in before the critics and fans come pounding on Anthony’s door.

Covering the development of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, the origins and early course of the Cold War and the advent of the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War explores a still neglected aspect of Winston Churchill's career: his relationship with and thinking on nuclear weapons.

In the year 2058, if you want someone to do the hands-on investigative work that requires a little finesse and sensitivity, not to mention the ability to shrug off a good beating in the process, then Zachary Nixon Johnson, the last freelance private eye on earth, is your man. What starts out as a simple missing-persons case for Zach quickly turns into a convoluted and desperate chase for the most unlikely weapon of unimaginable power ever conceived: the Bionic Bikini.

Leading analysts have predicted for decades that nuclear weapons would help pacify international politics. But why do international relations in the nuclear age remain so competitive? Indeed, why are today's major geopolitical rivalries intensifying? In The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution, Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press tackle the central puzzle of the nuclear age: The persistence of intense geopolitical competition in the shadow of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear terrorism is such a disturbing prospect that we shy away from its details. Yet, as a consequence, we fail to understand how best to defeat it. Michael Levi takes us inside nuclear terrorism and behind the decisions a terrorist leader would be faced with in pursuing a nuclear plot. Along the way, Levi identifies the many obstacles, large and small, that such a terrorist scheme might encounter, allowing him to discover a host of ways that any plan might be foiled.

A comprehensive study of the missile system that formed a critical component of the United States' nuclear arsenal. The Titan II ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) program was developed by the United States military to bolster the size, strength, and speed of the nation's strategic weapons arsenal in the 1950s and 1960s.

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.

He was described as one of the only persons smarter than Einstein, by no less than Eugene Wigner, a Nobel-Prize winning physicist, who knew both of them well. He was a polymath who spoke multiple languages and possessed an extraordinary intellect. He could perform complex mathematical calculations in his head, recite entire books verbatim after a single reading, and engage in advanced scientific discussions even as a child. He made groundbreaking contributions to mathematics, physics, economics, and computer science, notably developing the Monte Carlo method for nuclear reactor simulations ...

In Nuclear Folly, award-winning Historian Serhii Plokhy tells the riveting story of those weeks, tracing the tortuous decision-making and calculated brinkmanship of John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and of their advisors and commanders on the ground. More often than not, Plokhy argues, the Americans and Soviets simply misread each other, operating under mutual distrust, second-guesses and false information. Despite all of this, nuclear disaster was avoided thanks to one very human reason: fear.

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.

In this Very Short Introduction, John Heilbron draws on sources never before presented in English to cover the life and work of one of the most creative physicists of the 20th century. In addition to his role as a scientist, Heilbron considers Bohr as a statesman and Danish cultural icon, who built scientific institutions and pushed for the extension of international cooperation in science to all nation states. As a humanist he was concerned with the cultivation of all sides of the individual, and with the complementary contributions of all peoples to the sum of human culture.

For Agent Curie, the battlefield has become his laboratory. While other scientists tinker away at Los Alamos, he hunts down the masterminds behind the Nazi nuclear program. But after the first nuke drops on Japan, military intelligence assigns him to a new secret mission. A top German scientist has disappeared. A devastating firefight in Berlin is the only lead. The clues? Radiation spikes. Tanks with holes melted right through their armor. What does it all mean? There's a new weapon in the field. One with more devastating potential than anyone can imagine. A nuclear gun that fits in the ...

During the Cold War, American policymakers sought nuclear advantages to offset an alleged Soviet edge. Policymakers hoped that US nuclear capabilities would safeguard deterrence, when backed perhaps by a set of coercive tactics. But policymakers also hedged their bets with plans to fight a nuclear war to their advantage should deterrence fail. In The False Promise of Superiority, James H. Lebovic argues that the US approach was fraught with peril and remains so today.

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?

What would be the opposite of a Black Hole, a gravity source so powerful that not even light can escape it? The opposite would be a negative gravity source so powerful that nothing can even touch it! Dr. Applebreath has been developing energy weapons and defenses for decades built on this concept. JJ’s President’s Suit is a lightweight business suit that employs this principle to render the wearer invulnerable to small arms fire by absorbing the incoming energy of approaching projectiles and reflecting them back with equal momentum. Farley’s Anti-Gravity Ballroom enabling dancers to ...

Will President Trump destroy civilization or win the Nobel Peace Prize? Humankind’s survival feels like a jump ball that could go either way. We are perched on a precipice, and the reason we are looking into an abyss of nuclear annihilation is that the American president has unencumbered, unilateral control over the nuclear codes. One thing we know for sure is that the mind of Donald Trump is currently in control of our fate. Never before have the nuclear codes been in the hands of a man who many observers view as unstable and erratic.

An Afro-Russian KGB agent returns to his forefathers' homeland — Chicago — to track down a Russian dissident prepared to unleash the ultimate doomsday device. Dissatisfied by the results of the Post World War I Civil Rights movement, angry African-Americans immigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930's, for the promise of equality under Communism. Colonel Damian Turner, a native Afro-Russian KGB agent, returns to Chicago, the former home of his grandfather, as part of a worldwide manhunt for one of his nation's highest ranking officers, Marshall Victor Craig. Craig, infuriated at the ...

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.