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The Ni-Go Project
- The History and Legacy of Imperial Japan’s Nuclear Weapons Program During World War II
- Narrated by: Daniel Houle
- Length: 1 hr and 56 mins
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Publisher's summary
“What if the enemy should get the atomic bomb before we did! We could not run the mortal risk of being outstripped in this awful sphere.” (Winston Churchill)
Before the Second World War, military conflicts were fought under orthodox conditions, usually termed “conventional warfare”, but several innovations had significantly changed combat, leading inextricably to the race for a nuclear weapon in the 1930s and 1940s. Conflicts had been fought by armies on horseback with guns of varying sophistication since the 16th century, but mechanized warfare and machine guns changed this calculus and set the stage for future combat by the end of World War I. Other sinister changes entered the fray during this conflict, such as chemical weapons like chlorine and mustard gas. The total warfare brought about by World War I and ensuing wars like the Spanish Civil War made the quest for the most powerful weapons somewhat necessary.
Tens of millions died during World War II as the warring powers raced to create the best fighter planes, tanks, and guns, and eventually that race extended to bombs which carried enough power to destroy civilization itself. While the war raged in Europe and the Pacific, a dream team of Nobel laureates was working on the Manhattan Project in America, a program kept so secret that Vice President Harry Truman didn’t know about it until he took the presidency after FDR’s death in April 1945.
The Manhattan Project would ultimately yield the “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” bombs that released more than 100 Terajoules of energy at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but as it turned out, the Axis were not far behind with their own nuclear weapons program. When the Nazis’ quest for a nuclear weapon began in earnest in 1939, no one really had a handle on how important nuclear weapons would prove to war and geopolitics.
The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, along with the Cold War-era tests and their accompanying mushroom clouds, would demonstrate the true power and terror of nuclear weapons, but in the late 1930s these bombs were only vaguely being thought through, particularly after the successful first experiment to split the atom by a German scientist. The nuclear age itself was in its infancy, barely 35 years old, but within a few short years, the advent of nuclear war loomed over the world and the prospect of the enemy winning the nuclear race kept Allied leaders awake at night.
In November 1921, roughly a year after the Treaty of Versailles came into effect, Japan, Britain, and the United States gathered to sign another treaty of disarmament at the Washington Naval Conference. However, Japan opted against renewing the pact in the mid-1930s, and around the same time, Germany openly breached the terms of the former treaty and began to restock their weapons. This gave rise to the birth of a new and unprecedented arms race, one that had catastrophically disastrous consequences about a decade later.
Although their project is typically overlooked given the American use of the bombs and then the Soviets following suit early on in the Cold War, the Japanese avidly pursued nuclear weapons, as well.
The Ni-Go Project: The History and Legacy of Imperial Japan’s Nuclear Weapons Program during World War II examines Japan’s race to reach the ultimate goal during the war, how they went about their objectives, and why they failed.
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Overall
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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.
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A Good Overview/Introduction to the Bomb Race
- By Ashlyn on 08-05-20
By: Michael Joseloff
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Burning the Sky
- Operation Argus and the Untold Story of the Cold War Nuclear Tests in Outer Space
- By: Mark Wolverton
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Extraordinary interesting history
- By Magnus Almgren on 10-23-20
By: Mark Wolverton
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The Making of the Atomic Bomb
- 25th Anniversary Edition
- By: Richard Rhodes
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 37 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Here for the first time, in rich human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan. Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly - or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity, there was a span of hardly more than 25 years.
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Beware limitations of the reader
- By JFanson on 01-01-19
By: Richard Rhodes
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Toxic
- A History of Nerve Agents, from Nazi Germany to Putin's Russia
- By: Dan Kaszeta
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Nerve agents are the world's deadliest means of chemical warfare. Nazi Germany developed the first military-grade nerve agents and massive industry for their manufacture. At the end of the Second World War, the Allies were stunned to discover this advanced and extensive program. The Soviets and Western powers embarked on a new arms race, amassing huge chemical arsenals. From their Nazi invention to the 2018 Novichok attack in Britain, Dan Kaszeta uncovers nerve agents' gradual spread across the world, despite international arms control efforts.
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Solid primer on nerve agent history and technology
- By Jim Nasium on 01-16-22
By: Dan Kaszeta
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First War of Physics
- The Secret History of the Atom Bomb 1939-1949
- By: Jim Baggott
- Narrated by: Mark Ashby
- Length: 17 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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For all atom bomb and physics nerds
- By Jodie Swafford on 11-30-18
By: Jim Baggott
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Dark Sun
- The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
- By: Richard Rhodes
- Narrated by: Richard Rhodes
- Length: 6 hrs
- Abridged
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Richard Rhodes' landmark history of the atomic bomb won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now, in this majestic new masterpiece of history, science, and politics, he tells for the first time the secret story of how and why the hydrogen bomb was made, and traces the path by which this supreme artifact of 20th-century technology became the defining issue of the Cold War.
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Abridged??
- By Delano on 04-17-13
By: Richard Rhodes
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Blackett's War
- The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare
- By: Stephen Budiansky
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In March 1941, after a year of unbroken and devastating U-boat onslaughts, the British War Cabinet decided to try a new strategy in the foundering naval campaign. To do so, they hired an intensely private, bohemian physicist who was also an ardent socialist. Patrick Blackett was a former navy officer and future winner of the Nobel Prize; he is little remembered today, but he and his fellow scientists did as much to win the war against Nazi Germany as almost anyone else.
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First time science used to fight a war
- By Jean on 08-20-14
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Sun in a Bottle
- The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking
- By: Charles Seife
- Narrated by: Bill Weideman
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past 50 years, governments and research teams have tried to bottle the sun with lasers, magnets, sound waves, and particle beams, struggling to harness the power of fusion. Again and again, they have failed, disgracing generations of scientists. Throughout this fascinating journey, Charles Seife introduces us to the daring geniuses, villains, and victims of fusion science.
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Focused on the Lone Wolves
- By Robert Goldston on 11-14-08
By: Charles Seife
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The Great Oil Conspiracy
- How the U.S. Government Hid the Nazi Discovery of Abiotic Oil from the American People
- By: Jerome R. Corsi
- Narrated by: Fleet Cooper
- Length: 3 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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At the end of World War II, U.S. intelligence agents confiscated thousands of Nazi documents on what was known as the “Fischer-Tropsch Process” - a series of equations developed by German chemists unlocking the secrets of how oil is formed. When the Nazis took power, Germany had resolved to develop enough synthetic oil to wage war successfully, even without abundant national oil reserves.
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Complete and total waste of time
- By Dustin on 07-25-14
By: Jerome R. Corsi
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A Fiery Peace in a Cold War
- Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
- By: Neil Sheehan
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 19 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Schriever rhymes with beaver.
- By John Gardner on 11-13-09
By: Neil Sheehan
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Tuxedo Park
- A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II
- By: Jennet Conant
- Narrated by: John Kroft
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In the late 1930s, legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the 20th century at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.
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Fantastic book, weak technical execution
- By Paul on 10-13-18
By: Jennet Conant
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Atoms and Ashes
- A Global History of Nuclear Disasters
- By: Serhii Plokhy
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Atoms and Ashes recounts the dramatic history of nuclear accidents that have dogged the industry in its military and civil incarnations since the 1950s. Through the stories of six terrifying major incidents—Bikini Atoll, Kyshtym, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—Cold War expert Serhii Plokhy explores the risks of nuclear power, both for military and peaceful purposes, while offering a vivid account of how individuals and governments make decisions under extraordinary circumstances.
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This was a pretty sensational and biased book.
- By J. Seawright on 06-11-22
By: Serhii Plokhy
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Insiders Reveal Secret Space Programs & Extraterrestrial Alliances
- By: Michael E. Salla
- Narrated by: Jerry Lord
- Length: 13 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Classified space programs have been an integral part of a complex jigsaw puzzle concerning UFOs, extraterrestrial life, ancient civilizations and advanced aerospace technologies, which have long defied any coherent understanding. Now finally, we have something to put all the pieces together with the disclosures of secret space program whistleblower, Corey Goode. A detailed investigation of Goode’s and other insider testimonies reveals the big picture of a parallel world of secret space programs and extraterrestrial alliances.
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A waste of time
- By Roland Vellanoweth on 03-09-19
By: Michael E. Salla