Nuclear Testing

The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg's hair-raising insider's account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization, whose legacy - and renewal under the Obama administration - threatens the very survival of humanity. It is scarcely possible to estimate the true dangers of our present nuclear policies without penetrating the secret realities of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, when Ellsberg had high-level access to them.

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.

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.

This Very Short Introduction looks at the science of nuclear weapons and how they differ from conventional weapons. Tracing the story of the nuclear bomb, Joseph Siracusa chronicles the race to acquire the H-bomb, a thermonuclear weapon with revolutionary implications; and the history of early arms control, nuclear deterrence, and nonproliferation. He also tracks the development of nuclear weapons from the origins of the Cold War in 1945 to the end of Moscow-dominated Communism in 1991, and examines the promise and prospect of missile defense.

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.

More than two centuries after World War III poisoned the planet, the final bastion of humanity lives on massive airships circling the globe in search of a habitable area to call home. Aging and outdated, most of the ships plummeted back to Earth long ago. The only thing keeping the two surviving lifeboats in the sky are Hell Divers - men and women who risk their lives by skydiving to the surface to scavenge for parts the ships desperately need.

Written in an accessible and authoritative voice, The Button reveals the shocking tales and sobering facts of nuclear executive authority throughout the atomic age, delivering a powerful condemnation against ever leaving explosive power this devastating under any one person's thumb.

Nearly 30 years after the end of the Cold War, today's world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis. Serhii Plokhy offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground.

It is the most famous military installation in the world. And it doesn't exist. Located a mere s75 miles outside of Las Vegas in Nevada's desert, the base has never been acknowledged by the US government - but Area 51 has captivated imaginations for decades. Annie Jacobsen had exclusive access to 19 men who served the base proudly and secretly for decades and are now aged 75-92, and unprecedented access to 55 additional military and intelligence personnel, scientists, pilots, and engineers linked to the secret base, 32 of whom lived and worked there for extended periods.

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.

On July 16, 1945, just weeks before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought about the surrender of Japan and the end of WWII, the US unleashed the world's first atomic bomb at the Trinity testing site located in the remote Tularosa Valley in New Mexico. In The First Atomic Bomb Janet Farrell Brodie explores the history of the Trinity test and those whose contributions have rarely been discussed—the men and women who constructed, served, and witnessed the first test—as well as the downwinders who suffered the consequences of radiation.

Kings of the Apocalypse: The King Family Trilogy and Adam II: A Post-Apocalyptic Trilogy are both stand-alone trilogies and can be read independently. However, the storylines are parallel narratives that are closely interconnected and are best understood and appreciated if the Adam II trilogy is read first. The King siblings are the products of illegal genetic engineering research that was intended to augment their abilities. Their whole world was the lab facility that they inhabited and the personnel who saw to their most basic needs. They were too young to know that they differed from ...

Let's rewind in time to meet a certain J. Robert Oppenheimer. We'll call him the "Master of Atomic Mayhem," and for a good reason. This lad, once a lover of poetry in the academic jungles of Harvard and Cambridge, ended up playing with the building blocks of the universe in the dry, remote desert of Los Alamos. In the midst of World War II, Oppenheimer was not penning sonnets to the serene landscape. Oh no, he was orchestrating the creation of the world's deadliest weapon, the atomic bomb, under a veil of secrecy. This cocktail of doom and destruction ushered in the Atomic Age. Post-war ...

Did the recent cinematic masterpiece, the Oppenheimer movie directed by the brilliant Christopher Nolan with Cillian Murphy in the lead role, captivate your imagination? Drawing inspiration from the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography "American Prometheus Oppenheimer" by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the film offers a mesmerizing glimpse into the enigmatic life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But if it ignited a spark of curiosity within you, urging you to delve deeper into the intricate tapestry of events and personalities that birthed the atomic age, then you're on the precipice of an ...

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...

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.

Striking and poignant, this searing exposé unravels the untold stories behind the Soviet nuclear disaster of 1986. Midnight in Chernobyl captures the truth below the molten core which irradiated the tangled web of bureaucracy determined to erase it and ended an era.