Nuclear Weapons

A fresh window on American history: the eye-opening truth about the government's secret plans to survive a catastrophic attack on US soil, even if the rest of us die - a road map that spans from the dawn of the nuclear age to today.

What If The Atomic Bomb Doesn’t Work? The Strategic Air Command’s nuclear bombers are airborne. Six hundred Minuteman missile sites are activated and prepared for attack. The U.S. nuclear submarine fleet is submerged and operating under sealed orders. Across the North Pole, Russia’s missile countdown is holding at two hours from zero. And Red China has mobilized and gone to Condition Yellow. Then, with the world only hours away from nuclear destruction, U.S. Senator Hugh McGavin asks: What if the atomic bomb doesn’t work? What if it never worked? This startling new novel asks these ...

Near the close of the Cold War era, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency used a highly placed mole within Taiwan's nuclear weapons program to halt the project just as it had accumulated enough plutonium to build a small arsenal of atomic bombs. Crossing the Red Line provides a first-hand account of how the CIA whisked its spy out of Taiwan and shut down the project in 1988. The U.S. had once tacitly supported the nuclear efforts of its Cold War allies -- Taiwan, Israel and South Africa -- all pariah states with hostile enemies on their borders. Yet decades later, America switched its ...

On the morning of April 26, 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill. In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy draws on new sources to tell the dramatic stories of the firefighters, scientists, and soldiers who heroically extinguished the nuclear inferno. He lays bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry....

Target: Dr. Kiana Avesta. Profile: Nuclear scientist. Mission: Extract and protect. Ethan Galaal and his team are sent to Iran to extract a nuclear scientist who has made a discovery that could transform uranium production. When a rival force arrives to take her out, things take a turn for the worse. A game of cat and mouse ensues as Ethan and his team move the scientist across Europe in a bid to save her. But no place is safe. The pursuers can’t be lost. When one of their own is captured, Ethan must make a choice. Give up the scientist or abandon his teammate to certain death. What would...

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.

It’s eight-seventeen on a Tuesday morning, and every coma patient in the world has just woken up. When an inexplicable phenomenon sweeps across the globe, the Australian government orders every agency to use their full resources to uncover the cause of the awakening. As her organisation's response, anti-terrorist unit agent Jacinta Robbins is assigned to lead a small investigative taskforce to satisfy their obligations, despite the event falling far outside the A.T.U.’s regular domain. However, as inexplicable events begin taking place across the city, evidence begins to mount against ...

April 12, 1945: After years of bloody conflict in Europe and the Pacific, America is stunned by news of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. In an instant, Vice President Harry Truman, who has been kept out of war planning and knows nothing of the top-secret Manhattan Project to develop the world’s first atomic bomb, must assume command of a nation at war on multiple continents—and confront one of the most consequential decisions in history. Countdown 1945 tells the gripping true story of the turbulent days, weeks, and months to follow.

From the earliest days of his dictatorship, Saddam Hussein had vowed to destroy Israel. So, when France sold Iraq a top-of-the-line nuclear reactor in 1975, the Israelis were justifiably concerned, especially when they discovered that Iraqi scientists had already formulated a secret program to extract weapon-grade plutonium from the reactor, a first critical step in creating an atomic bomb.

What if climate change isn’t an environmental challenge, but an energy challenge? In this visionary book, Dr Tim Gregory urges us to rethink the path to net zero. He argues that the solution to climate change lies not simply in replacing fossil fuels with renewables, but in fully embracing another energy source that emits zero carbon dioxide: nuclear power.

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?

My Journey at the Nuclear Brink is a continuation of William J. Perry's efforts to keep the world safe from a nuclear catastrophe. It tells the story of his coming of age in the nuclear era, his role in trying to shape and contain it, and how his thinking has changed about the threat these weapons pose. In a remarkable career, Perry has dealt firsthand with the changing nuclear threat.

In a city of secrets, a daring heist to steal a scientist could ignite a new, cold war — and cost one spy everything. Based on a true story. The war is over. Old allies become new rivals. As hot war turns to cold, a British spy in Washington D.C. hatches an audacious plot to snatch a renowned nuclear scientist from the top-secret Los Alamos facility in New Mexico. Idealistic young assistant Naval Attaché Tom Davis is recruited to spirit away the scientist from under the noses of both the FBI and their Soviet rivals. An unexpected love emerges, overshadowed by Tom's growing fear that his ...

So begins this suspenseful, impeccably researched history that draws on new access to diaries to tell the story of three men who were intimately involved with America’s decision to drop the atomic bomb—and Japan’s decision to surrender. They are Henry Stimson, the American Secretary of War, who oversaw J. Robert Oppenheimer under the Manhattan Project; Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific, who supervised the planes that dropped the bombs; and Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo.

After a devastating run of German victories, Allied troops are beginning to halt Hitler’s advance. But far from the battlefields, Allied scientists are struggling. Intelligence reports put them a distant second behind the Germans in a competition that could determine the outcome of the war: the race to build the world’s first nuclear weapon. For the Allies’ top scientists, the race is deeply personal. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Samuel Goudsmit have known Hitler’s chief atomic scientist, Werner Heisenberg, for years.

General Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer were the two men chiefly responsible for the building of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, code name The Manhattan Project. As the ranking military officer in charge of marshalling men and material for what was to be the most ambitious, expensive engineering feat in history, it was General Groves who hired Oppenheimer (with knowledge of his left-wing past), planned facilities that would extract the necessary enriched uranium, and saw to it that nothing interfered with the accelerated research and swift assembly of the weapon.

Ever since the conclusion of World War II, which was precipitated by the dropping of two atomic bombs, one each on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the specter of the nuclear annihilation of mankind on this “big blue marble” has hung over society like an omnipresent cloud. During the Cold War, which lasted from 1947 until 1991, conventional wisdom held that the end of life on Earth would eventually be brought about by the exchange of nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union. And then, in 1957, British author Nevil Shute wrote the incendiary novel On ...

'Trinity' was the codename for the test explosion of the atomic bomb in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. This exceptional book - Trinity - tells the story of the bomb's metaphorical father, Rudolf Peierls; his intellectual son, the atomic spy, Klaus Fuchs; and the ghosts of the security services in Britain, the USA and USSR.

Beth Edelman was the first woman Director of Central Intelligence, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. She was the first foreign-born individual to head the Central Intelligence Agency, having been born in Israel in 1960. And she was the first Director of Central Intelligence to be kidnapped. Abducted from the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, by captors unknown, she was whisked away to a location where she would be secure but out of touch with the outside world. The collective resources of the nation's law enforcement and intelligence communities were enlisted to determine her ...

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.