Nuclear Weapons

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 ...

A New Mexico County sheriff, John Beckett and his wife Shelly celebrate their wedding anniversary by taking a cruise aboard a luxury cruise liner and get far more than they bargained for when the ship is hijacked by international terrorists’ hell bent on nuking American cities. With the ship adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, the terrorists contact the President with their demands. All prisoners in GITMO are to be released or the passengers die. In true Die Hard, roller-coaster fashion, the sheriff sets out to stop the terrorists from launching nuclear weapons even if it means sinking the ...

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.

On September 23, 1949, President Harry S. Truman announced that an atomic explosion had occurred in the Soviet Union. Over the next few days, The New York Times and Washington Post ran articles discussing the timing of the explosion, its impact on military aid to Europe, and subsequent calls for international atomic control.

This book traces the history of the Manhattan Project, from the first glimmerings of the possibility of such a catastrophic weapon to the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It profiles the architects of the bomb, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, and how they tried to reconcile their personal feelings with their ambition as scientists. It looks at the role of the politicians and it includes first-hand accounts of those who experienced the effects of the bombings.

It's 1942 and the Nazis are racing to be the first to build a weapon unlike any known before. They have the physicists, they have the uranium, and now all their plans depend on amassing a single ingredient: heavy water, which is produced in Norway's Vemork, the lone plant in all the world that makes this rare substance. Under threat of death, Vemork's engineers push production into overdrive. For the Allies, the plant must be destroyed.

Hammerfall is a quiet town where nothing ever seems to happen, until one day in the late summer of 1999. The adults begin showing signs of a strange infection, turning them into ravenous lunatics that will stop at nothing to infect those around them. A group of teenagers, who had once been friends, find themselves thrust into a new world of carnage. Struggling to put aside their differences, they must learn to rely on one another as the town that they once knew now crumbles around them. Their lives hang in the balance when unlikely allies emerge, but the onslaught of the infected is not the...

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.

Kristen Iversen grew up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." Full Body Burden is the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and--unknown to those who lived there--tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.

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.

It's as big as the Empire State Building, a massive floating fortress at the heart of a U.S. Navy Carrier Battle Group. It's a Nimitz-class nuclear carrier, the most powerful weapons system on the planet; nothing can touch it. So when the first stunned messages say that the Thomas Jefferson has disappeared, the Navy reacts with disbelief. But the truth becomes inescapable: a Nimitz-class carrier has been claimed by nuclear catastrophe. No other explanation is possible.

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.

In October 1962, when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over its installation of missiles in Cuba, few people shared the behind-the-scenes story as it is told here by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In this unique account, he describes the hour-by-hour negotiations, with particular attention to the actions and views of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. In a foreword to this edition, the distinguished historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., discusses the book's enduring importance and the significance of new information about the crisis that has come to light from the former Soviet Union.

Book two in the series. The Cold War began just after World War II and ended with the demise of the Soviet Union in about 1990. The most critical point in the war, most often thought to be the missile crisis in ‘62, may have instead been in those first five years of President Reagan’s presidency, the early 80s. Khrushchev dead, leadership in the Kremlin in flux. Poland, led by the labor union Solidarity, revolting against years of domination. Soviet introduction of mobile SS-20 tactical nuclear missile into the forward theater answered by deployment of ground launched cruise missiles, ...

Redeye Fulda Cold by Bill Fortin is a first in series of a "MASH-like" war stories. Set in 1969 West Germany; the deployment of the newly developed Redeye ground to air missile system is brought to bear inside the 3rd Armored Division’s 1st/48th Infantry Battalion. This very inspiring tale inside a very Cold War takes the men of the 3rd Armored Division though a series of history making operations. Carefully crafted CIA planning provides the pause necessary and ultimately prevents a nuclear showdown with Russia. The infamous Fulda Gap becomes the center stage of the action.

Adam and his two companions continue to fight their way across the devastated landscape of a post-apocalyptic America. The artificial intelligence that inhabits the supercomputer implanted in Adam's brain has become more and more human. Nan, the A.I., eventually reacquires the body she feared had been lost to her forever. Adam and Nan train rigorously to gain the maximum benefit from their genetic augmentations as Adam's wolfdog, Roe, grows stronger in both body and mind. With the support of his companions Adam is able to overcome the many challenges along the way. During their journey the ...

From master storyteller and historian H. W. Brands comes the riveting story of how President Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur squared off to decide America's future in the aftermath of World War II.

During the 1950s, the big fear was nuclear war. From the Soviet Union's perspective, having a communist stronghold so close to the American border was a dream come true. By the early 1960s, there was a strong undercurrent of tension between the Americans and the Soviets. Aside from the disastrous loss of life and dignity at the Bay of Pigs, something else happened. The line was firmly drawn in the sand. The world was on the brink of nuclear war.

Based on years of forensic archaeology combined with interviews of more than two hundred survivors and their families, Ghosts of Hiroshima is a you-are-there account of ordinary human beings thrust into extraordinary events, during which our modern civilization entered its most challenging phase—a nuclear adolescence that, unless we are very wise and learn from our past, we may not

Just days after the United States decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. But even before the surrender, the US government and military had begun a secret propaganda and information suppression campaign to hide the devastating nature of these experimental weapons. The cover-up intensified as Occupation forces closed the atomic cities to Allied reporters, preventing leaks about the horrific long-term effects of radiation that would kill thousands during the months after the blast.