Weapon History

Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers exchanged at Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in the first prisoner exchange of the nuclear age? Bridge of Spies vividly traces their paths to that electrifying moment on February 10, 1962, when their fates helped to define the conflicts and lethal undercurrents of the most dangerous years of the cold war.

Author John J. Culbertson, a former Fifth Marine sniper himself, presents the riveting true stories of young Americans who fought with bolt rifles and bounties on their heads during the fiercest combat of the war, from 1967 through the desperate Tet battle for Hue in early '68.

Stalking the Red Bear, for the first time ever, describes the action principally from the perspective of a commanding officer of a nuclear submarine during the Cold War - the one man aboard a sub who makes the critical decisions - taking us closer to the Soviet target than any work on submarine espionage has ever done before. This is the untold story of a covert submarine espionage operation against the Soviet Union during the Cold War as experienced by the commanding officer of an active submarine.

The US Army entered World War II unprepared. Lacking Germany's blitzkrieg approach of coordinated armor and air power, the army was organized to fight two wars: one on the ground and one in the air. Previous commentators have blamed Congressional funding and public apathy for the army's unprepared state. David E. Johnson believes instead that the principal causes were internal: army culture and bureaucracy, and their combined impact on the development of weapons and doctrine.

Weapons of biological and chemical warfare have been in use for thousands of years, and Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs, Adrienne Mayor's fascinating exploration of the origins of biological and unethical warfare, draws extraordinary connections between the mythical worlds of Hercules and the Trojan War, the accounts of Herodotus and Thucydides, and modern methods of war and terrorism.

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....

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.

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.

The inside story of how America's enemies launched a cyberwar against us - and how we've learned to fight back. In this dramatic audiobook, former assistant attorney general John P. Carlin takes listeners to the front lines of a global but little-understood fight as the Justice Department and the FBI chases down hackers, online terrorist recruiters, and spies.

On the morning of August 2, 1990, Iraqi armored divisions invaded the tiny emirate of Kuwait. The Iraqi Army, after its long war with Iran, had more combat experience than the US Army. The Kuwaitis had collapsed easily enough, but the invasion drew fierce condemnation from the United Nations, which demanded Hussein's withdrawal. Undeterred by the rhetoric, the Iraqi dictator massed his forces along the Saudi Arabian border and dared the world to stop him.

For nearly a decade, Brett Velicovich was at the center of America's new warfare: using unmanned aerial vehicles - drones - to take down the world's deadliest terrorists across the globe. One of an elite handful in the entire military with the authority to select targets and issue death orders, he worked in concert with the full human and technological network of American intelligence - assets, analysts, spies, informants - and the military's elite operatives to stalk, capture, and eliminate high-value targets in al-Qaeda and ISIS.

In 2012, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was clinging to power in a vicious civil war. When intelligence revealed that the dictator might resort to using chemical weapons, Pres. Obama warned that doing so would cross “a red line”. Assad did it anyway, killing hundreds of civilians and forcing Obama to decide if he would mire America in another unpopular war. When Russia offered to broker the removal of Syria’s chemical weapons, Obama leapt at the out. So begins an electrifying race to find, remove, and destroy 1,300 tons of chemical weapons in the midst of a raging civil war.

Fred Kaplan, hailed by The New York Times as “a rare combination of defense intellectual and pugnacious reporter,” takes us into the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “Tank” in the Pentagon, and the vast chambers of Strategic Command to bring us the untold stories - based on exclusive interviews and previously classified documents - of how America’s presidents and generals have thought about, threatened, broached, and just barely avoided nuclear war from the dawn of the atomic age until today.

By midsummer 1945, Japan had long since lost the war in the Pacific. The people were not told the truth, and neither was the emperor. Japanese generals, admirals, and statesmen knew, but only a handful of leaders were willing to accept defeat. Most were bent on fighting the Allies until the last Japanese soldier died and the last city burned to the ground.

Thomas B. Costain's four-volume history of the Plantagenets begins with The Conquering Family and the conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, closing with the reign of John in 1216. The troubled period after the Norman Conquest, when the foundations of government were hammered out between monarch and people, comes to life through Costain's storytelling skill and historical imagination.

This audiobook is the story of combat from the guerrilla’s perspective and surviving against the overwhelming firepower and technology of a superpower. The audiobook consists of a series of combat vignettes related by Mujahideen combatants in Afghanistan that shows the good and the bad, the mistakes and successes of guerrillas fighting the Soviet military forces.

The story of the battlefield in the 20th century was dominated by a handful of developments. Foremost of these was the introduction and refinement of tanks. In Tank Warfare, prominent military historian Jeremy Black offers a comprehensive global account of the history of tanks and armored warfare in the 20th and 21st centuries.

At the dawn of the 20th century, humanity was facing global disaster. Mass starvation, long predicted for the fast-growing population, was about to become a reality. A call went out to the worlds scientists to find a solution. This is the story of the two enormously gifted, fatally flawed men who found it: the brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and the reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and saved millions of lives.

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.

Ninja warriors were masters of stealth and disguise. They could quickly defeat their enemies without raising the alarm. They may not have realized it, but they owed their success to science. Learn how science helped ninjas successfully achieve their secret missions.