Nuclear Testing

Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in—where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world’s end requires massive decisions made on seconds’ notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have. Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario.

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.

The most important place in American nuclear history are the Marshall Islands - an idyllic Pacific paradise that served as the staging ground for more than 60 US nuclear tests. It was here, from 1946 to 1958, that America perfected the weapon that preserved the peace of the post-war years. It was here - with the 1954 Castle Bravo test over Bikini Atoll - that America executed its largest nuclear detonation, a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima.

In the sleepy and conservative 1950s, the British began a series of nuclear tests in the Montebello archipelago off the west coast of Australia. Even today, few people know about the three huge atom bombs that were detonated there, but they lodged in the consciousness of the young Robert Drewe and would linger with him for years to come. In this moving sequel to The Shark Net, and with his characteristic frankness, humour and cinematic imagery, Drewe travels to the Montebellos to visit the territory that has held his imagination since childhood.

USA Bestselling Author May McGoldrick writing as Jan Coffey Counting down to Chernobyl-scale disaster THE CLOCK STARTS NOW… Tick… Scientist Marion Kagan is the sole survivor after gunmen attack the facility where her team was working on a top-secret project. Wounded and trapped in a collapsed building, Marion must stop radioactive test samples from leaking out and killing millions. …tick… In a Connecticut psychiatric hospital, Marion’s twin sister, who has been in a comalike state for years, begins to thrash violently in her bed. When an experimental program is used on her to read...