Reidel, 1980. - 188 p. Although the World War II efforts to develop nuclear weapons have inspired a very large literature, it struck us as noteworthy that virtually nothing existed in the form of firsthand accounts. Now It Can Be Told , by General Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project's military commander, is probably the most prominent exception, but the scientists themselves...
MIT Press, 2009. — 424 p. — ISBN: 0262012723. The nuclear winter phenomenon burst upon the public's consciousness in 1983. Added to the horror of a nuclear war's immediate effects was the fear that the smoke from fires ignited by the explosions would block the sun, creating an extended "winter" that might kill more people worldwide than the initial nuclear strikes. In A Nuclear...
Los Alamos, 1976. - 82 p. The world’s first atomic explosion occurred July 16, 1945 at the Trinity test site in southern New Mexico. This account of the organization at Trinity, the experiments, and the results, under the direction of K. T. Bainbridge, was written shortly after completion of the test. Because few deletions were required from the original (secret) report, this...
Springer, 2001. - 384 p. From April through December of 1945, ten of Nazi Germany's greatest nuclear physicists were detained by Allied military and intelligence services in a kind of gilded cage at Farm Hall, an English country manor near Cambridge. The physicists knew the Reich had failed to develop an atomic bomb, and they soon learned, from a BBC radio report on August 6,...
Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. — 416 p. — ISBN10: 0190233109; ISBN13: 978-0190233105. Kate Brown's Plutopia is an amazing book. It is a work of comparative history: a study of Richland, the town for the Hanford plutonium complex, and Ozersk, the town in the southern Urals where the USSR built its plutonium weapons. Plutonium is the most dangerous substance on...
Springer, 2017. — 125 p. This gripping book brings back to life the events surrounding the internment of ten German Nuclear Scientists immediately after World War II. It is also an "eye-witness" account of the dawning of the nuclear age, with the dialogue and narrative spanning the period before, during and after atomic bombs were dropped on Japan at the end of the war. This...
Columbia University Press, 2007. — 206 p. Since their inception, nuclear weapons have multiplied at an alarming rate, leaving everyone from policymakers to concerned citizens wondering what it will take to slow, stop, or even reverse their spread. With clarity and expertise, Joseph Cirincione presents an even-handed look at the history of nuclear proliferation and an optimistic...
Boulder, San Francisco: Westview Press, 1995. – 260 p. When the time came in August 1945 to seriously develop the atomic bomb, the Soviet program was able to draw upon many individuals who made prominent contributions to the twentieth century revolution in physics. A brief history of the Soviet bomb. An overview of the stockpile and complex. Chelyabinsk-65/Mayak chemical...
Osprey Publishing, 2009. – 218 p. The concept of a super-weapon has dominated military thought and development since the beginning of warfare. From spear to bow, ballista to cannon, Greek fire to gunpowder, and from black powder to dynamite, human beings have sought increasingly deadly ways to achieve victory in war. The rapid discovery of the secrets of the atom, beginning in...
Washington, D.C.: Department of Energy, 2006. — 244 p. — ISBN: 9781304069535. Charlie promised to be a Big Shot, as the press dubbed the nation’s twenty-fifth nuclear weapons test. With a projected explosive yield equivalent to thirty-three kilotons of TNT, Charlie would be the largest test conducted to date at the Nevada Proving Ground, formerly — and again to be — the Nevada...
World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., 2015. — 186 p. — ISBN: 978-9814632072. In this engaging scientific memoir, Kenneth Ford recounts the time when, in his mid-twenties, he was a member of the team that designed and built the first hydrogen bomb. He worked with — and relaxed with — scientific giants of that time such as Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, Stan Ulam, John von...
IOP Publishing, 1993. — 313 p. From June to December 1945 ten leading German scientists were detained at Farm Hall, Godmanchester, near Cambridge, England. The scientists detained were Erich Bagge, Kurt Diebner, Walther Gerlach, Otto Hahn, Paul Harteck, Werner Heisenberg, Horst Korsching, Max von Laue, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker and Karl Wirtz. Their conversations were...
Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2005. — 432 p. Herman Kahn was the only nuclear strategist in America who might have made a living as a standup comedian. Indeed, galumphing around stages across the country, joking his way through one grotesque thermonuclear scenario after another, he came frighteningly close. In telling the story of Herman Kahn, whose 1960 book On...
Schiffer Publishing Ltd, 1996. — 236 p. On 16 July, 1945, an event occurred that changed the world forever. At 5:29 AM Mountain War Time (4:49 AM standard time), on an empty stretch of desert 60 TI.iles from Alamogordo New Mexico, a gigantic explosion occurred. So powerful was this blast that the earth noticeably shook for 30 miles around. So brilliant was the light, it was...
US Department of Energy, Office of History and Heritage Resources, DOE/MA-0002 Revised, 2010. – 127 p. — (National Security History Series, Volume I). In a national survey at the turn of the millennium, journalists and historians ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb and the surrender of Japan to end the Second World War as the top story of the twentieth century. The advent of...
University of North Carolina Press, 1955. - 238 p. The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness. His compelling diary was...
2nd ed. — Chukelea, 2007. — 7 volumes. — 3068 p. The Swords of Armageddon is the first and only comprehensive illustrated history of the post-World War II design, development, and testing of U.S. nuclear weaponry available to the public. Volume I includes the front matter and a description of fission and fusion weapon physics, fuels, and weapon design and detonation principles....
Los Alamos: Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory of the University of California, LAMS-2532 (Vol. I), Report written in 1947, Report distributed in 1961. — 390 p. These three volumes constitute a record of the technical, administrative, and policy-making activities of the Los Alamos Project (Project Y) from its inception under the Manhattan District through the development of the...
Los Alamos: Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2013. — 107 p. History of the Russian Nuclear Program Newly published briefing slides from a Los Alamos history of the Russian nuclear weapons program include rare images and photographs of key personalities and facilities in the Russian (formerly Soviet) nuclear program.
Penguin Books, 1946. - 119 p. Hiroshima is a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey. In May 1946, The New Yorker sent John Hersey, journalist and author of A Bell for Adano , to the Far East to find out what had really happened at Hiroshima: to interview survivors of the catastrophe, to endeavour to describe what they had seen and felt and thought, what the...
University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962. – 824 p. (Book + foto only). The authors have presented a clear account of the possible routes to the bomb, of the obstacles blocking each path, and of the tensions built up during the quest for solutions. Both the scientist and the lay reader will find this not only the fullest and best documented but the most...
Oak Ridge: USA EC Technical Information Center, 1972. – 748 p. (Book + foto only). Atomic Shield, the second volume in a historical series, begins in January, 1947, when the Commission assumed responsibility for the nation's atomic energy program; it ends with the detonation of the first thermonuclear device and the Presidential election in November, 1952. . The most troubling...
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. – 732 p. (Book + foto only). This volume, the third in the official history of the Atomic Energy Commission, makes sizable contributions in several areas, including the Eisenhower presidency. A Secret Mission. The Eisenhower Imprint. The President and the Bomb. The Oppenheimer Case. The Political Arena. Nuclear Weapons: A New...
Cambridge University Press, 2004. - 509 p. This volume treats the technical research that led to the first atomic bombs. The authors explore how the "critical assembly" of scientists, engineers, and military personnel at Los Alamos collaborated during World War II, blending their traditions to create a new approach to large-scale research. The research was characterized by...
University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. - 288 p. A social history of New Mexico’s “Atomic City”. Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the Atomic Age, is the community that revolutionized modern weaponry and science. An “instant city,” created in 1943, Los Alamos quickly grew to accommodate six thousand people — scientists and experts who came to work in the top-secret...
World Scientific, NJ, USA, 2017. — 222 p. — ISBN10: 9813145935. This book is a collection of personal memories about the people who participated in the USSR atomic project - Landau, Alikhanov, Pomeranchuk, Alikhanian, Migdal Jr., Gribov, Zeldovich, Sakharov, Kurchatov, Vannikov, Eldian. As the author is the only living person who was involved in the project, these personal...
Unite States Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Tests. Nuclear Test Personnel Review30 April 1982. — 138 p. Prepared by the Defense Nuclear Agency as Executive Agency for the Department of Defense. ARGUS was the designation given to the three high-altitude nuclear test shots conducted by the United States in the South Atlantic Ocean in August and September 1958. The ARGUS shots were...
Center of military history United States Army, Washington D.C., 1985. - 685 p. The U.S. Army played a key role in the formation and administration of the Manhattan Project, the World War II organization which produced the atomic bombs that not only contributed decisively to ending the war with Japan but also opened the way to a new atomic age. This volume describes how the...
New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2007. — 692 p. This book examines the military side of what may be the major problem that faces civilization, comparing some of the alternatives that seem available and some of the implications of these choices.
Transaction Publishers, 2007. — 668 p. On Thermonuclear War was controversial when originally published and remains so today. It is iconoclastic, crosses disciplinary boundaries, and finally it is calm and compellingly reasonable. The book was widely read on both sides of the Iron Curtain and the result was serious revision in both Western and Soviet strategy and doctrine. As a...
World Scientific, 2004. — 188 p. Editor: Cynthia C. Kelly — President, The Atomic Heritage Foundation, USA. During World War II, nations raced to construct the world's first nuclear weapon that would determine the future of the world. The Manhattan Project, one of the most significant achievements of the 20th century, was the culmination of America's war effort. Today, although...
Washington (DC): Regnery Publishing, 2015. From Amazon: In the summer of 1945, the world was changed forever. The bomb that ushered in the atomic age was the product of one of history's most improbable partnerships. Leslie Richard Groves was made overlord of the impossibly vast scientific enterprise known as the Manhattan Project. His mission: to beat the Nazis to the atomic...
Anchor Academic Publishing, 2013. — 68 p. Throughout human history there may hardly be found any other single decision that still causes such high amounts of scholarly debate as does the dropping of Atomic Bombs upon the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 6th 1945, and respectively, three days later upon the city of Nagasaki. These events have caused close to 100 000...
Kindle Singles, 2019. — 148 p. Winner of the Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award given by Peace Corps Worldwide. 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...
Publisher: Presidio Press; First Edition edition (April 28, 2009) Language: English ISBN10: 0891419047 ISBN13: 978-0891419044 In The Day We Lost the H-Bomb, science writer Barbara Moran marshals a wealth of new information and recently declassified material to give the definitive account of the Cold War’s biggest nuclear weapons disaster. On January 17, 1966, a U.S. Air Force...
New York: Chelsea House, 2008. — 129 p. — (Great historic disasters) If you walk down the main street in Hiroshima, Japan, today, it is almost impossible to tell that it was ever anything but a peaceful, tranquil city. Automobiles and scooters move over tree-lined streets. Lush gardens line the gently flowing river. Despite a population of more than one million people,...
Simon & Schuster, New York, 1995, 760 p. Prologue: Deliveries. Part One - A Choice Between Worlds. A Smell of Nuclear Powder. Diffusion. Material of Immense Value. A Russian Connection. Super Lend-Lease. Rendezvous. Mass Production. Explosions. Provide the Bomb. A Pretty Good Description. Part Two - New Weapons Added to the Arsenals. Transitions. Peculiar Sovereignties....
A Touchstone Book, New York, 1986, 923 p. Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics. Robert Oppenheimer. In an enterprise such as the building of the atomic bomb the difference between ideas, hopes, suggestions and theoretical calculations, and solid numbers based on measurement, is paramount. All the...
Oxford University Press, 2008. - 371 p. The US decision to drop an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 remains one of the most controversial events of the twentieth century. However, the controversy over the rights and wrongs of dropping the bomb has tended to obscure a number of fundamental and sobering truths about the development of this fearsome...
Penguin Press, 2013. — 640 p. Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America’s nuclear arsenal. A ground-breaking account of accidents, near-misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: how do you deploy...
Princeton University Press, 2000 - 279 p. In the Shadow of the Bomb narrates how two charismatic, exceptionally talented physicists--J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hans A. Bethe--came to terms with the nuclear weapons they helped to create. In 1945, the United States dropped the bomb, and physicists were forced to contemplate disquieting questions about their roles and...
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. National Air And Space Museum, 1995. — 154 p. This text was to have been the script for theNational Air and Space Museum's exhibition of the Enola Gay, focusingon the end of World War II and the decision of the United States touse of the atomic bomb. The Enola Gay was a B-29 aircraft thatcarried the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima,...
Los Alamos: Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory of the University of California, LA-5200, UC-2, 1973. – 121 p. These three volumes constitute a record of the technical, administrative, and policy-making activities of the Los Alamos Project (Project Y) from its inception under the Manhattan District through the development of the atomic bomb, and during the period folowing the end...
Los Alamos: Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory of the University of California, LAMS-2532 (Vol. II), Report written in 1947, Report distributed in 1961. — 249 p. These three volumes constitute a record of the technical, administrative, and policy-making activities of the Los Alamos Project (Project Y) from its inception under the Manhattan District through the development of the...
New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2005. — 416 p. ISBN: 978-0-7595-2807-9. Nine men - Oppenheimer, Teller, Fermi, Bohr, Lawrence, Bethe, Rabi, Szilard, Compton - brilliant men who believed in science and who saw before anyone else the amazing workings of an invisible world. Some of them were fleeing Nazism in Europe, others quietly slipping out of university teaching jobs, all...
Basic Books, 2001. — 336 p. — ISBN10: 0738205850 ISBN13: 9780738205854. In this book, Mark Walker - a historical scholar of Nazi science - brings to light the overwhelming impact of Hitler's regime on science and, ultimately, on the pursuit of the German atomic bomb. Walker meticulously draws on hundreds of original documents to examine the role of German scientists in the rise...
HarperCollins, 2005. - 358 p. On a quiet Monday morning in August 1945, a five-ton bomb — dubbed Little Boy by its creators — was dropped from an American plane onto the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On that day, a firestorm of previously unimagined power was unleashed on a vibrant metropolis of 300,000 people, leaving one third of its population dead, its buildings and landmarks...
Harvard University Press, 1988. — 535 p. Our thinking is inhabited by images - images of sometimes curious and overwhelming power. The mushroom cloud, weird rays that can transform the flesh, the twilight world following a nuclear war, the white city of the future, the brilliant but mad scientist who plots to destroy the world - all these images and more relate to nuclear...
Harvard University Press, 2012. — 367 p. After a tsunami destroyed the cooling system at Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, triggering a meltdown, protesters around the world challenged the use of nuclear power. Germany announced it would close its plants by 2022. Although the ills of fossil fuels are better understood than ever, the threat of climate change has never...
Stanford University Press, 2009. - 254 p. Confronting the Bomb tells the dramatic, inspiring story of how citizen activism helped curb the nuclear arms race and prevent nuclear war. This abbreviated version of Lawrence Wittner's award-winning trilogy, The Struggle Against the Bomb , shows how a worldwide, grassroots campaign — the largest social movement of modern times —...
HarperCollins, 2009. — 238 p. A former nuclear weapons designer and head of nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos, Stephen M. Younger delivers an insightful and urgent inquisition on the role of nuclear weapons in the twenty-first century. Does the United States need a massive atomic arsenal in an era of precision bombs and missile defense? Under what circumstances might we...
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