Books about Bomb making from Amazon.com

If the first 270 pages of this book had been published separately, they would have made up a lively, insightful, beautifully written history of theoretical physics and the men and women who plumbed the mysteries of the atom. Along with the following 600 pages, they become a sweeping epic, filled with terror and pity, of the ultimate scientific quest: the development of the ultimate weapon. Rhodes is a peerless explainer of difficult concepts; he is even better at chronicling the personalities who made the discoveries that led to the Bomb. Niels Bohr dominates the first half of the book as J. Robert Oppenheimer does the second; both men were gifted philosophers of science as well as brilliant physicists. The central irony of this book, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, is that the greatest minds of the century contributed to the greatest destructive force in history..
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From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb: the story of the entire postwar superpower arms race, climaxing during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade when the United States and the Soviet Union came within scant hours of nuclear war—and then nearly agreed to abolish nuclear weapons

In a narrative that reads like a thriller, Rhodes reveals how the Reagan administration’s unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s led ailing Soviet leader Yuri Andropov to conclude that Reagan must be preparing for a nuclear war. In the fall of 1983, when NATO staged a larger than usual series of field exercises that included, uniquely, a practice run-up to a nuclear attack, the Soviet military came very close to launching a defensive first strike on Europe and North America. With Soviet aircraft loaded with nuclear bombs warming up on East German runways, U.S. intelligence organizations finally realized the danger. Then Reagan, out of deep conviction, launched the arms-reduction campaign of his second presidential term and set the stage for his famous 1986 summit meeting with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the breakthroughs that followed.

Rhodes reveals the early influence of neoconservatives and right-wing figures such as Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz. We see how Perle in particular sabotaged the Reykjavik meeting by convincing Reagan that mutual nuclear disarmament meant giving up his cherished dream of strategic defense (the Star Wars system). Rhodes’s detailed exploration of these and other events constitutes a prehistory of the neoconservatives, demonstrating that the manipulation of government and public opinion with fake intelligence and threat inflation that the administration of George W. Bush has used to justify the current “war on terror” and the disastrous invasion of Iraq were developed and applied in the Reagan era and even before.

Drawing on personal interviews with both Soviet and U.S. participants, and on a wealth of new documentation, memoir literature, and oral history that has become available only in the past ten years, Rhodes recounts what actually happened in the final years of the Cold War that led to its dramatic end. The story is new, compelling, and continually surprising—a revelatory re-creation of a hugely important era of our recent history.

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An engrossing history of the scientific discoveries, political maneuverings, and cold-war espionage leading to the creation of mankind's most destructive weapon.

Includes 94 archival photographs and a glossary with brief descriptions of the hundreds of people interviewed and discussed in the book. Author Richard Rhodes won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his previous atomic tome, The Making of the Atomic Bomb..
Price: $8.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Crucible of Power is an updated, revised version of Howard Jones's classic text Quest for Security: A History of U.S. Foreign Relations from 1897. This book, available again for use in the classroom, presents a straightforward, balanced, and comprehensive history of American international relations and the major events in the nation's foreign affairs from 1897 to the present. Crucible of Power demonstrates the complexities involved in the decision-making process that led to the rise and decline of the United States (relative to the ascent of other nations) in world power status. The book focuses on the personalities, security interests, and expansionist tendencies behind the formation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy and highlights the intimate relationship between foreign and domestic policy. The author also examines the historical antecedents of the nation's twentieth-century foreign policy. This volume relies on the natural chronology of historical events to organize and narrate the story as the nation's leaders saw it. Using this narrative approach, the tangled and often confusing nature of foreign affairs is uncovered without the illusion that in the past, American foreign relations took place in a well-ordered fashion. From this history, students will understand the plight of present-day policymakers who encounter an array of problems that are rarely susceptible to simple analysis and ready solution. A companion volume to this book, Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations to 1913 is also available from SR Books. Crucible of Power is an indispensable core text for American diplomatic history courses and courses on twentieth-century American foreign policy..
Price: $9.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Remembering the Manhattan Project provides readers insight into the Manhattan Project, one of the most significant undertakings of the 20th century, its legacy and lessons for meeting today's challenges. Each of the papers from the Atomic Heritage Foundation's Symposium on the Manhattan Project in Part I provides a different perspective on what made the Manhattan Project succeed in doing in just 27 months what every other leading nation in World War II concluded was impossible. Part II provides a plan for preserving some of the original Manhattan Project structures and other aspects of this history for the public and future generations. Most of these properties have not been accessible to the public and in recent years have been stripped of their equipment and slated for demolition. Part II proposes a strategy for preserving significant Manhattan Project properties, first-of-a-kind equipment, artifacts, and other tangible remnants of this remarkable undertaking..
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Scientists relate the discovery of nuclear fission in the 1930s and the harnessing of this power to build weapons of mass destruction. A U.S. president and top military officials discuss the ultimate decision to use these new atomic bombs to end a long and costly world war. (20020701).
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