Weapons & Warfare

There is only one scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end the world as we know it in a matter of hours: nuclear war. And one of the triggers for that war would be a nuclear missile inbound toward the United States.

Discover the definitive history of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, in this Pulitzer Prize finalist from the author of the New York Times best seller Area 51....

A revelatory history of how postcolonial African Independence movements were systematically undermined by one nation above all: the US....

Here for the first time, in rich human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed....

The first volume in a two-book series about each of the atomic bomb drops that ended the Pacific War based on years of irreplicable personal interviews with survivors to tell a story of devastation and resilience....

Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America's nuclear arsenal....

The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg's hair-raising insider's account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization....

The virus now known as Stuxnet was unlike any other piece of malware built before: Rather than simply hijacking targeted computers or stealing information from them, it proved that a piece of code could escape the digital realm and wreak actual, physical destruction....

It's 1942 and the Nazis are racing to be the first to build a weapon unlike any known before. They have the physicists, they have the uranium, and now all their plans depend on amassing a single ingredient....

A fresh window on American history: the eye-opening truth about the government's secret plans to survive a catastrophic attack on US soil, even if the rest of us die....

Atoms and Ashes recounts the dramatic history of nuclear accidents that have dogged the industry in its military and civil incarnations since the 1950s. Through the stories of six terrifying major incidents, Cold War expert Serhii Plokhy explores the risks of nuclear power....

From Chris Wallace, the veteran journalist and anchor of Fox News Sunday comes a behind-the-scenes account of the 116 days leading up to the American attack on Hiroshima....

From a preeminent historian of Eastern Europe, the definitive history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster....

In October 1962, when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over its installation of missiles in Cuba, few people shared the behind-the-scenes story as it is told here by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy....

Here, for the first time, in a brilliant, panoramic portrait by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is the definitive, often shocking story of the politics and the science behind the development of the hydrogen bomb and the birth of the Cold War.

On the hellish battlefields of World War II Europe, Major Dick Winters led his Easy Company from the confusion and chaos of the D-day invasion to the final capture of Hitler's Eagle's Nest....

This book by military strategist Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., is the definitive take on the race for military dominance in the twenty-first century....

The first major bioterror event in the United States - the anthrax attacks in October 2001 - was a clarion call for scientists who work with "hot" agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against biological weapons....

Few people are aware that John Moses Browning - a tall, humble, cerebral man born in 1855 and raised as a Mormon in the American West - was the mind behind many of the world-changing firearms that dominated more than a century of conflict....

General Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer were the two men chiefly responsible for the building of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, code name The Manhattan Project. Edward Teller assesses General Groves' contributions—and Oppenheimer's—while reflecting on the awesome legacy of their work.

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....

From New York Times best-selling author Sam Kean comes the gripping, untold story of a renegade group of scientists and spies determined to keep Adolf Hitler from obtaining the ultimate prize: a nuclear bomb....

From the author the classic The Wizards of Armageddon and Pulitzer Prize finalist comes the definitive history of American policy on nuclear war - and Presidents’ actions in nuclear crises - from Truman to Trump....

In the early hours of February 25, 1968, a Russian submarine armed with three nuclear ballistic missiles set sail from its base in Siberia on a routine combat patrol to Hawaii. Then it vanished....

Starting with the premise that all civilizations owe their origins to warmaking, Keegan probes the meanings, motivations, and methods underlying war in different societies....