Download or read book Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era written by Vipin Narang and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-25 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world is in a second nuclear age in which regional powers play an increasingly prominent role. These states have small nuclear arsenals, often face multiple active conflicts, and sometimes have weak institutions. How do these nuclear states—and potential future ones—manage their nuclear forces and influence international conflict? Examining the reasoning and deterrence consequences of regional power nuclear strategies, this book demonstrates that these strategies matter greatly to international stability and it provides new insights into conflict dynamics across important areas of the world such as the Middle East, East Asia, and South Asia. Vipin Narang identifies the diversity of regional power nuclear strategies and describes in detail the posture each regional power has adopted over time. Developing a theory for the sources of regional power nuclear strategies, he offers the first systematic explanation of why states choose the postures they do and under what conditions they might shift strategies. Narang then analyzes the effects of these choices on a state's ability to deter conflict. Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, he shows that, contrary to a bedrock article of faith in the canon of nuclear deterrence, the acquisition of nuclear weapons does not produce a uniform deterrent effect against opponents. Rather, some postures deter conflict more successfully than others. Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era considers the range of nuclear choices made by regional powers and the critical challenges they pose to modern international security.

Download or read book The Age of Radiance written by Craig Nelson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Radiation is a complex and paradoxical concept: staggering amounts of energy flow from seemingly inert rock and that energy is both useful and dangerous. While nuclear energy affects our everyday lives--from nuclear medicine and food irradiation to microwave technology--its invisible rays trigger biological damage, birth defects, and cellular mayhem. From the end of the nineteenth century through the use of the atomic bomb in World War II to the twenty-first century's confrontation with the dangers of nuclear power, Craig Nelson illuminates a pageant of fascinating historical figures: Enrico Fermi, Marie and Pierre Curie, Albert Einstein, FDR, Robert Oppenheimer, and Ronald Reagan, among others. He reveals many little-known details, including how Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler transformed America from a country that created light bulbs and telephones into one that split atoms; how the most grotesque weapon ever invented could realize Alfred Nobel's lifelong dream of global peace; how emergency workers and low-level utility employees fought to contain a run-amok nuclear reactor, while wondering if they would live or die. Brilliantly fascinating and remarkably accessible, The Age of Radiance traces mankind's complicated and difficult relationship with the dangerous power it discovered and made part of civilization"--

Download or read book The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution written by Keir A. Lieber and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading analysts have predicted for decades that nuclear weapons would help pacify international politics. The core notion is that countries protected by these fearsome weapons can stop competing so intensely with their adversaries: they can end their arms races, scale back their alliances, and stop jockeying for strategic territory. But rarely have theory and practice been so opposed. Why do international relations in the nuclear age remain so competitive? Indeed, why are today's major geopolitical rivalries intensifying? In The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution, Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press tackle the central puzzle of the nuclear age: the persistence of intense geopolitical competition in the shadow of nuclear weapons. They explain why the Cold War superpowers raced so feverishly against each other; why the creation of "mutual assured destruction" does not ensure peace; and why the rapid technological changes of the 21st century will weaken deterrence in critical hotspots around the world. By explaining how the nuclear revolution falls short, Lieber and Press discover answers to the most pressing questions about deterrence in the coming decades: how much capability is required for a reliable nuclear deterrent, how conventional conflicts may become nuclear wars, and how great care is required now to prevent new technology from ushering in an age of nuclear instability.

Download or read book Atomic Bill written by Vincent Kiernan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Atomic Bill, Vincent Kiernan examines the fraught career of New York Times science journalist, William L. Laurence and shows his professional and personal lives to be a cautionary tale of dangerous proximity to power. Laurence was fascinated with atomic science and its militarization. When the Manhattan Project drew near to perfecting the atomic bomb, he was recruited to write much of the government's press materials that were distributed on the day that Hiroshima was obliterated. That instantly crowned Laurence as one of the leading journalistic experts on the atomic bomb. As the Cold War dawned, some assessed Laurence as a propagandist defending the militarization of atomic energy. For others, he was a skilled science communicator who provided the public with a deep understanding of the atomic bomb. Laurence leveraged his perch at the Times to engage in paid speechmaking, book writing, filmmaking, and radio broadcasting. His work for the Times declined in quality even as his relationships with people in power grew closer and more lucrative. Atomic Bill reveals extraordinary ethical lapses by Laurence such as a cheating scandal at Harvard University and plagiarizing from press releases about atomic bomb tests in the Pacific. In 1963 a conflict of interest related to the 1964 World's Fair in New York City led to his forced retirement from the Times. Kiernan shows Laurence to have set the trend, common among today's journalists of science and technology, to prioritize gee-whiz coverage of discoveries. That approach, in which Laurence served the interests of governmental official and scientists, recommends a full revision of our understanding of the dawn of the atomic era.

Download or read book The Fragile Balance of Terror written by Vipin Narang and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Fragile Balance of Terror, the foremost experts on nuclear policy and strategy offer insight into an era rife with more nuclear powers. Some of these new powers suffer domestic instability, others are led by pathological personalist dictators, and many are situated in highly unstable regions of the world—a volatile mix of variables. The increasing fragility of deterrence in the twenty-first century is created by a confluence of forces: military technologies that create vulnerable arsenals, a novel information ecosystem that rapidly transmits both information and misinformation, nuclear rivalries that include three or more nuclear powers, and dictatorial decision making that encourages rash choices. The nuclear threats posed by India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea are thus fraught with danger. The Fragile Balance of Terror, edited by Vipin Narang and Scott D. Sagan, brings together a diverse collection of rigorous and creative scholars who analyze how the nuclear landscape is changing for the worse. Scholars, pundits, and policymakers who think that the spread of nuclear weapons can create stable forms of nuclear deterrence in the future will be forced to think again. Contributors: Giles David Arceneaux, Mark S. Bell, Christopher Clary, Peter D. Feaver, Jeffrey Lewis, Rose McDermott, Nicholas L. Miller, Vipin Narang, Ankit Panda, Scott D. Sagan, Caitlin Talmadge, Heather Williams, Amy Zegart

Download or read book Atoms and Molecules Interacting with Light written by Peter van der Straten and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-04 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on atom-light interactions and containing numerous exercises, this in-depth textbook prepares students for research in a fast-growing field.

Download or read book Atomic Testing in Mississippi written by David Allen Burke and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2012-11-05 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Atomic Testing in Mississippi, David Allen Burke illuminates the nearly forgotten history of America's only nuclear detonations east of the Mississippi River. The atomic tests, conducted in the mid-1960s nearly 3,000 feet below ground in Mississippi's Tatum Salt Dome, posed a potential risk for those living within 150 miles of the site, which included residents of Hattiesburg, Jackson, Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, and New Orleans. While the detonations provided the United States with verification methods that helped limit the world's nuclear arsenals, they sparked widespread public concern. In 1964 and 1966 the Atomic Energy Commission conducted experiments at the salt dome -- code-named Dribble -- surrounded by a greater population density than any other test site in the United States. Although the detonations were not weapons tests, they fostered a conflict between regional politicians interested in government-funded science projects and a population leery of nuclear testing near their homes. Even today, residents near the salt dome are still fearful of long-term negative health consequences. Despite its controversy, Project Dribble provided the technology needed to detect and assess the performance of distant underground atomic explosions and thus verify international weapons treaty compliance. This technology led to advanced seismological systems that now provide tsunami warnings and detect atomic activity in other nuclear nations, such as Pakistan and North Korea.

Download or read book The First Nuclear Era written by Alvin M. Weinberg and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1994 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The autobiography of a highly influential nuclear engineer and scientist whose work began in the 1940s and continues today. He recounts his education, his role in the Manhattan Project, his stint as director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1955- 73), and his subsequent work with both successful and unsuccessful commercial power reactors. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book The Making of the Atomic Bomb written by Richard Rhodes and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 890 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award** The definitive history of nuclear weapons—from the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project—this epic work details the science, the people, and the sociopolitical realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb. This sweeping account begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of nuclear fission, and continues to World War Two and the Americans’ race to beat Hitler’s Nazis. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the nearly overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful dropping of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reading like a character-driven suspense novel, the book introduces the players in this saga of physics, politics, and human psychology—from FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who pioneered quantum theory and the application of thermonuclear fission, including Planck, Szilard, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Meitner, von Neumann, and Lawrence. From nuclear power’s earliest foreshadowing in the work of H.G. Wells to the bright glare of Trinity at Alamogordo and the arms race of the Cold War, this dread invention forever changed the course of human history, and The Making of The Atomic Bomb provides a panoramic backdrop for that story. Richard Rhodes’s ability to craft compelling biographical portraits is matched only by his rigorous scholarship. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail that any reader can follow, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a thought-provoking and masterful work.

Download or read book Atomic Tunes written by Tim Smolko and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the soundtrack for a nuclear war? During the Cold War, over 500 songs were written about nuclear weapons, fear of the Soviet Union, civil defense, bomb shelters, McCarthyism, uranium mining, the space race, espionage, the Berlin Wall, and glasnost. This music uncovers aspects of these world-changing events that documentaries and history books cannot. In Atomic Tunes, Tim and Joanna Smolko explore everything from the serious to the comical, the morbid to the crude, showing the widespread concern among musicians coping with the effect of communism on American society and the threat of a nuclear conflict of global proportions. Atomic Tunes presents a musical history of the Cold War, analyzing the songs that capture the fear of those who lived under the shadow of Stalin, Sputnik, mushroom clouds, and missiles.

Download or read book Life Atomic written by Angela N. H. Creager and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-10-02 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began mass-producing radioisotopes, sending out nearly 64,000 shipments of radioactive materials to scientists and physicians by 1955. Even as the atomic bomb became the focus of Cold War anxiety, radioisotopes represented the government’s efforts to harness the power of the atom for peace—advancing medicine, domestic energy, and foreign relations. In Life Atomic, Angela N. H. Creager tells the story of how these radioisotopes, which were simultaneously scientific tools and political icons, transformed biomedicine and ecology. Government-produced radioisotopes provided physicians with new tools for diagnosis and therapy, specifically cancer therapy, and enabled biologists to trace molecular transformations. Yet the government’s attempt to present radioisotopes as marvelous dividends of the atomic age was undercut in the 1950s by the fallout debates, as scientists and citizens recognized the hazards of low-level radiation. Creager reveals that growing consciousness of the danger of radioactivity did not reduce the demand for radioisotopes at hospitals and laboratories, but it did change their popular representation from a therapeutic agent to an environmental poison. She then demonstrates how, by the late twentieth century, public fear of radioactivity overshadowed any appreciation of the positive consequences of the AEC’s provision of radioisotopes for research and medicine.

Download or read book Elvis s Army written by Brian McAllister Linn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the U.S. Army drafted Elvis Presley in 1958, it quickly set about transforming the King of Rock and Roll from a rebellious teen idol into a clean-cut GI. Trading in his gold-trimmed jacket for standard-issue fatigues, Elvis became a model soldier in an army facing the unprecedented challenge of building a fighting force for the Atomic Age. In an era that threatened Soviet-American thermonuclear annihilation, the army declared it could limit atomic warfare to the battlefield. It not only adopted a radically new way of fighting but also revamped its equipment, organization, concepts, and training practices. From massive garrisons in Germany and Korea to nuclear tests to portable atomic weapons, the army reinvented itself. Its revolution in warfare required an equal revolution in personnel: the new army needed young officers and soldiers who were highly motivated, well trained, and technologically adept. Drafting Elvis demonstrated that even this icon of youth culture was not too cool to wear the army’s uniform. The army of the 1950s was America’s most racially and economically egalitarian institution, providing millions with education, technical skills, athletics, and other opportunities. With the cooperation of both the army and the media, military service became a common theme in television, music, and movies, and part of this generation’s identity. Brian Linn traces the origins, evolution, and ultimate failure of the army’s attempt to transform itself for atomic warfare, revealing not only the army’s vital role in creating Cold War America but also the experiences of its forgotten soldiers.

Download or read book Rocket Men written by Craig Nelson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-06-25 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller "Celebrates a bold era when voyaging beyond the Earth was deemed crucial to national security and pride." -The Wall Street Journal Restoring the drama, majesty, and sheer improbability of an American triumph, this is award-winning historian Craig Nelson's definitive and thrilling story of man's first trip to the moon. At 9:32 a.m. on July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 rocket launched in the presence of more than a million spectators who had gathered to witness a truly historic event. Through interviews, 23,000 pages of NASA oral histories, and declassified CIA documents on the space race, Rocket Men presents a vivid narrative of the moon mission, taking readers on the journey to one of the last frontiers of the human imagination.

Download or read book North Korea and Nuclear Weapons written by Sung Chull Kim and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North Korea is perilously close to developing strategic nuclear weapons capable of hitting the United States and its East Asian allies. Since their first nuclear test in 2006, North Korea has struggled to perfect the required delivery systems. Kim Jong-un’s regime now appears to be close, however. Sung Chull Kim, Michael D. Cohen, and the volume contributors contend that the time to prevent North Korea from achieving this capability is virtually over; scholars and policymakers must turn their attention to how to deter a nuclear North Korea. The United States, South Korea, and Japan must also come to terms with the fact that North Korea will be able to deter them with its nuclear arsenal. How will the erratic Kim Jong-un behave when North Korea develops the capability to hit medium- and long-range targets with nuclear weapons? How will and should the United States, South Korea, Japan, and China respond, and what will this mean for regional stability in the short term and long term? The international group of authors in this volume address these questions and offer a timely analysis of the consequences of an operational North Korean nuclear capability for international security.

Download or read book Restricted Data written by Alex Wellerstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-09 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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"--

Download or read book Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century written by Thérèse Delpech and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2012-03-28 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deterrence remains a primary doctrine for dealing with the threat of nuclear weapons in the 21st century. The author reviews the history of nuclear deterrence and calls for a renewed intellectual effort to address the relevance of concepts such as first strike, escalation, extended deterrence, and other Cold War-era strategies in today's complex world of additional superpowers, smaller nuclear powers, and nonstate actors.

Download or read book The Age Atomic written by Adam Christopher and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2013-03-26 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Empire State is dying. The Fissure connecting the pocket universe to New York has vanished, plunging the city into a deep freeze and the populace are demanding a return to Prohibition and rationing as energy supplies dwindle. Meanwhile, in 1954 New York, the political dynamic has changed and Nimrod finds his department subsumed by a new group, Atoms For Peace, led by the mysterious Evelyn McHale. As Rad uncovers a new threat to his city, Atoms For Peace prepare their army for a transdimensional invasion. Their goal: total conquest – or destruction – of the Empire State. File Under: Science Fiction [ Splitting the Atoms | Angry Robots | Crossing | Universal Destruction ]