Author : Stephanie Cooke
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 497 pages
File Size : 22,50 MB
Release : 2009-04-28
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 1596916176
A provocative history of nuclear power explores the pros and cons of nuclear energy as a power source that has given way to international tension and weapons development, in a critical assessment that also considers nuclear energy's possible role in countering global warming.
Author : Paul Bracken
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 25,24 MB
Release : 2012-11-13
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1429945044
A leading international security strategist offers a compelling new way to "think about the unthinkable." The cold war ended more than two decades ago, and with its end came a reduction in the threat of nuclear weapons—a luxury that we can no longer indulge. It's not just the threat of Iran getting the bomb or North Korea doing something rash; the whole complexion of global power politics is changing because of the reemergence of nuclear weapons as a vital element of statecraft and power politics. In short, we have entered the second nuclear age. In this provocative and agenda-setting book, Paul Bracken of Yale University argues that we need to pay renewed attention to nuclear weapons and how their presence will transform the way crises develop and escalate. He draws on his years of experience analyzing defense strategy to make the case that the United States needs to start thinking seriously about these issues once again, especially as new countries acquire nuclear capabilities. He walks us through war-game scenarios that are all too realistic, to show how nuclear weapons are changing the calculus of power politics, and he offers an incisive tour of the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia to underscore how the United States must not allow itself to be unprepared for managing such crises. Frank in its tone and farsighted in its analysis, The Second Nuclear Age is the essential guide to the new rules of international politics.
Author : John Bradley
Publisher :
Page : 358 pages
File Size : 38,78 MB
Release : 1995
Category : Poetry
ISBN :
An anthology on the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the A-bomb on Japan. In When We Say Hiroshima, Sadako writes: "When we say Hiroshima, / do people answer, gently, / Ah, Hiroshima? / Say Hiroshima, and hear Pearl Harbor. / Say Hiroshima, and hear Rape of Nanjing. / Say Hiroshima, and hear of women and children / thrown into trenches, doused with gasoline, / and burned alive in Manila ... Say Hiroshima, / and we don't hear, gently, / Ah, Hiroshima."
Author : D. Krieger
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 37,7 MB
Release : 2008-12-05
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780230609044
This book examines the intersections between international law and national policies, and nuclear proliferation and disarmament, offering a way out if policy makers of leading countries can summon the vision and political will to move away from the nuclear precipice and ensure humanity's future.
Author : Alex Wellerstein
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 558 pages
File Size : 50,69 MB
Release : 2021-04-09
Category : History
ISBN : 022602038X
"Nuclear weapons, since their conception, have been the subject of secrecy. In the months after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American scientific establishment, the American government, and the American public all wrestled with what was called the "problem of secrecy," wondering not only whether secrecy was appropriate and effective as a means of controlling this new technology but also whether it was compatible with the country's core values. Out of a messy context of propaganda, confusion, spy scares, and the grave counsel of competing groups of scientists, what historian Alex Wellerstein calls a "new regime of secrecy" was put into place. It was unlike any other previous or since. Nuclear secrets were given their own unique legal designation in American law ("restricted data"), one that operates differently than all other forms of national security classification and exists to this day. Drawing on massive amounts of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time at the author's request, Restricted Data is a narrative account of nuclear secrecy and the tensions and uncertainty that built as the Cold War continued. In the US, both science and democracy are pitted against nuclear secrecy, and this makes its history uniquely compelling and timely"--
Author : Lawrence S. Wittner
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 25,90 MB
Release : 2009-05-12
Category : History
ISBN : 0804771243
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—challenged the nuclear priorities of the great powers and, ultimately, thwarted their nuclear ambitions. Based on massive research in the files of peace and disarmament organizations and in formerly top secret government records, extensive interviews with antinuclear activists and government officials, and memoirs and other published materials, Confronting the Bomb opens a unique window on one of the most important issues of the modern era: survival in the nuclear age. It covers the entire period of significant opposition to the bomb, from the final stages of the Second World War up to the present. Along the way, it provides fascinating glimpses of the interaction of key nuclear disarmament activists and policymakers, including Albert Einstein, Harry Truman, Albert Schweitzer, Norman Cousins, Nikita Khrushchev, Bertrand Russell, Andrei Sakharov, Linus Pauling, Dwight Eisenhower, Harold Macmillan, John F. Kennedy, Randy Forsberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Helen Caldicott, E.P. Thompson, and Ronald Reagan. Overall, however, it is a story of popular mobilization and its effectiveness.
Author : McGeorge Bundy
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 756 pages
File Size : 27,91 MB
Release : 1990
Category : History
ISBN :
Bundy, a former special assistant for national security under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, explores the history of the nuclear bomb.
Author : Glenn Theodore Seaborg
Publisher : Farrar Straus & Giroux
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 29,45 MB
Release : 2001-01-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780374299910
The renowned physicist describes his Nobel Prize-winning career, his work with the Manhattan Project, his discovery of the element that makes atomic bombs explode, and his term as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Author : James L. Nolan Jr.
Publisher : Belknap Press
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 19,68 MB
Release : 2020-08-06
Category : History
ISBN : 0674248635
An unflinching examination of the moral and professional dilemmas faced by physicians who took part in the Manhattan Project. After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grandfather’s role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project. Dr. Nolan, it turned out, had been a significant figure. A talented ob-gyn radiologist, he cared for the scientists on the project, organized safety and evacuation plans for the Trinity test at Alamogordo, escorted the “Little Boy” bomb from Los Alamos to the Pacific Islands, and was one of the first Americans to enter the irradiated ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Participation on the project challenged Dr. Nolan’s instincts as a healer. He and his medical colleagues were often conflicted, torn between their duty and desire to win the war and their oaths to protect life. Atomic Doctors follows these physicians as they sought to maximize the health and safety of those exposed to nuclear radiation, all the while serving leaders determined to minimize delays and maintain secrecy. Called upon both to guard against the harmful effects of radiation and to downplay its hazards, doctors struggled with the ethics of ending the deadliest of all wars using the most lethal of all weapons. Their work became a very human drama of ideals, co-optation, and complicity. A vital and vivid account of a largely unknown chapter in atomic history, Atomic Doctors is a profound meditation on the moral dilemmas that ordinary people face in extraordinary times.
Author : Fred Pearce
Publisher : Beacon Press
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 13,27 MB
Release : 2018-05-22
Category : Science
ISBN : 0807092495
An investigation into our complicated 8-decade-long relationship with nuclear technology, from the bomb to nuclear accidents to nuclear waste. From Hiroshima to Chernobyl, Fukushima to the growing legacy of lethal radioactive waste, humanity’s struggle to conquer atomic energy is rife with secrecy, deceit, human error, blatant disregard for life, short-sighted politics, and fear. Fallout is an eye-opening odyssey through the first eight decades of this struggle and the radioactive landscapes it has left behind. We are, he finds, forever torn between technological hubris and all-too-human terror about what we have created. At first, Pearce reminds us, America loved the bomb. Las Vegas, only seventy miles from the Nevada site of some hundred atmospheric tests, crowned four Miss Atomic Bombs in 1950s. Later, communities downwind of these tests suffered high cancer rates. The fate of a group of Japanese fishermen, who suffered high radiation doses from the first hydrogen bomb test in Bikini atoll, was worse. The United States Atomic Energy Commission accused them of being Red spies and ignored requests from the doctors desperately trying to treat them. Pearce moves on to explore the closed cities of the Soviet Union, where plutonium was refined and nuclear bombs tested throughout the ’50s and ’60s, and where the full extent of environmental and human damage is only now coming to light. Exploring the radioactive badlands created by nuclear accidents—not only the well-known examples of Chernobyl and Fukushima, but also the little known area around Satlykovo in the Russian Ural Mountains and the Windscale fire in the UK—Pearce describes the compulsive secrecy, deviousness, and lack of accountability that have persisted even as the technology has morphed from military to civilian uses. Finally, Pearce turns to the toxic legacies of nuclear technology: the emerging dilemmas over handling its waste and decommissioning of the great radioactive structures of the nuclear age, and the fearful doublethink over the world’s growing stockpiles of plutonium, the most lethal and ubiquitous product of nuclear technologies. For any reader who craves a clear-headed examination of the tangled relationship between a powerful technology and human politics, foibles, fears, and arrogance, Fallout is the definitive look at humanity’s nuclear adventure.
