Nuclear War History

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.

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.

To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias - communities of nuclear families living in highly subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Fully employed and medically monitored, the residents of Richland and Ozersk enjoyed all the pleasures of consumer society while nearby, migrants, prisoners, and soldiers were banned from plutopia - they lived in temporary "staging grounds" and often performed the most dangerous work at the plant.

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.

Solo hay un escenario, aparte del impacto de un asteroide, capaz de acabar con el mundo tal como lo conocemos en cuestión de horas: una guerra nuclear. Hasta ahora, nadie fuera de los círculos oficiales ha sabido con exactitud qué sucedería si un estado rebelde lanzara una cabeza nuclear contra el Pentágono. Segundo a segundo y minuto a minuto, estos son los acontecimientos, acciones y protocolos reales que coreografían el fin de la civilización.

The first rule of nuclear war is that there are no rules. Up to now, no one outside of official circles has known exactly what would happen if a rogue state launched a nuclear missile at the Pentagon. Second by second and minute by minute, these are the real-life protocols that choreograph the end of civilisation as we know it. Because the plans for General Nuclear War are among the most classified secrets held by the United States government, this book takes the listener up to the razor’s edge of what can legally be known.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has punctured the longest stretch of peace between major powers since WWII, bringing the horrors of warfare—past, present, and future—to the forefront of listeners' minds. In The Shortest History of War, internationally acclaimed historian Gwynne Dyer adds urgently needed context. Dyer ably charts the evolution of violent conflict: tribal aggression, classical combat, limited war, total war, and cold war-followed by present-day terrorism, nuclear threats, and the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS).

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.

Drawing on troves of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time through the author's efforts, Restricted Data traces the complex evolution of the US nuclear secrecy regime from the first whisper of the atomic bomb through the mounting tensions of the Cold War and into the early 21st century. A compelling history of powerful ideas at war, it tells a story that feels distinctly American: rich, sprawling, and built on the conflict between high-minded idealism and ugly, fearful power.

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.

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.

On August 9, 1945, on the tiny island of Tinian in the South Pacific, a 25-year-old American Army Air Corps major named Charles W. Sweeney climbed aboard a B-29 Superfortress in command of his first combat mission, one devised specifically to bring a long and terrible war to a necessary conclusion.... The last military officer to command an atomic mission, Maj. Gen. Charles W. Sweeney has the unique distinction of having been an integral part of both the Hiroshima and the Nagasaki bombing runs.

The Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo was described by a 1943 Manhattan Project intelligence report as the "most important deposit of uranium yet discovered in the world". So long as the United States remained in control of this mine and its supply, it had a world monopoly on the primary material needed to build an atomic bomb. The uranium from this mine was used to build the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The culminating volume in Richard Rhodes’s monumental and prizewinning history of nuclear weapons, offering the first comprehensive narrative of the challenges faced in a post-Cold War age. The past 20 years have transformed our relationship with nuclear weapons drastically. With extraordinary depth of knowledge and understanding, Rhodes makes clear how the five original nuclear powers - Russia, Great Britain, France, China, and especially the United States - have struggled with new realities.

Is it worthwhile to invest one hour of your time to learning about nuclear war survival? The devastating events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved that there will always be survivors in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. They did a few things right that made all the difference, and after listening to this short audiobook, you’ll know these critical steps too....

Autumn 1944. World War II is nearly over in Europe, but in the Pacific, American soldiers face an enemy who will not surrender despite a massive and mounting death toll. Meanwhile, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team of scientists are preparing to test the deadliest weapon known to mankind. Newly inaugurated president Harry Truman faces the most important political decision in history: whether to use that weapon.

According to the mainstream Western narrative, Vladimir Putin is an insatiable, Hitler-like expansionist who invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked land grab. That story is incorrect. In reality, the United States and NATO bear much of the responsibility for the Ukraine crisis.

The Dead Hand is the suspense-filled story of the people who sought to brake the speeding locomotive of the arms race, then rushed to secure the nuclear and biological weapons left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union—a dangerous legacy that haunts us even today.The Cold War was an epoch of massive overkill.

A harrowing account of Russia’s occupation of the Chernobyl and Zaporizhia nuclear power plants and the dangers of nuclear power colliding with warfare.

On August 9, 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a small port city on Japan's southernmost island. An estimated 74,000 people died within the first five months, and another 75,000 were injured. Published on the 70th anniversary of the bombing, Nagasaki takes listeners from the morning of the bombing to the city today, telling the firsthand experiences of five survivors, all of whom were teenagers at the time of the devastation.