Nuclear Testing

After the Soviet Union proved to the United States that it possessed an operational intercontinental ballistic missile with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the world watched anxiously as the two superpowers engaged in a game of nuclear one-upmanship. Amid this rising tension, eccentric physicist Nicholas Christofilos brought forth an outlandish, albeit ingenious, idea to defend the US from a Soviet attack: detonating nuclear warheads in space to create an artificial radiation belt that would fry incoming ICBMs. Known as Operation Argus, this plan is the most secret and riskiest experiment in history, and classified details of these nuclear tests have been long obscured.

This bestseller from a Pulitzer Prize finalist gives readers the complete untold story of the top-secret military base for the first time. "Compellingly hard-hitting." —New York Times It is the most famous military installation in the world. And it doesn't exist. Located a mere seventy-five...

Let's rewind in time to meet a certain J. Robert Oppenheimer. We'll call him the "Master of Atomic Mayhem," and for a good reason. This lad, once a lover of poetry in the academic jungles of Harvard and Cambridge, ended up playing with the building blocks of the universe in the dry, remote desert of Los Alamos. In the midst of World War II, Oppenheimer was not penning sonnets to the serene landscape. Oh no, he was orchestrating the creation of the world's deadliest weapon, the atomic bomb, under a veil of secrecy. This cocktail of doom and destruction ushered in the Atomic Age. Post-war ...

In the sleepy and conservative 1950s, the British began a series of nuclear tests in the Montebello archipelago off the west coast of Australia. Even today, few people know about the three huge atom bombs that were detonated there, but they lodged in the consciousness of the young Robert Drewe and would linger with him for years to come. In this moving sequel to The Shark Net, and with his characteristic frankness, humour and cinematic imagery, Drewe travels to the Montebellos to visit the territory that has held his imagination since childhood.

From A Sailor’s Letters “Directly after that flash and in the same spot was a water spout which went higher than the flame. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I say that spout went up half a mile.” Don was 17 when he joined the navy in 1946. His reason: wanted to see the world beyond the green hills of his home in Binghamton, New York. Filled with lust for adventure in less than six months, he joined 42,000 other sailors, airmen, members of Congress, and scientists gathered for Operation Crossroads at Bikini. There, he witnessed our entry into the Nuclear age. Don was attached ...

For fans of WWII fiction comes a powerful novel by Jennifer L. Wright about two young women coming of age during the Trinity nuclear bomb test in 1945. Sixteen-year-old Olive Alexander has lived on a ranch in the Jornada del Muerto region of southern New Mexico her entire life. But when World...

For nearly five decades, Jack Niedenthal has lived and worked across Micronesia and the Marshall Islands—as a Peace Corps volunteer, teacher, government advisor, filmmaker, journalist and advocate for the people of Bikini Atoll. In The Pacific Way, he brings together a powerful collection of reflections, essays and personal stories that explore the beauty, contradictions and enduring spirit of Pacific island life. From remote outer islands and traditional Marshallese culture to the legacy of nuclear testing, climate change, public health crises, governance, journalism and exile, these ...

Oppenheimer Explained: The Manhattan Project, Atomic Bomb Science, Scientific Responsibility, and the Making of the Nuclear Age traces how J. Robert Oppenheimer moved from brilliant but unsettled young physicist to the scientific leader of the Manhattan Project. It explains his education, his early work in theoretical physics, and the combination of intellect, ambition, charisma, and instability that shaped his career. Rather than reducing him to the simple label of “father of the atomic bomb,” the book shows how he became the person military planners and scientists trusted to organize ...

Australia did not abandon these places by accident. Across the continent, ruins still mark the places where Australia built, extracted, punished, confined, tested, displaced, prospered — and then moved on. Forgotten Australia tells the stories of 100 abandoned, lost and overlooked places: convict settlements, ghost towns, mining ruins, nuclear test sites, mission stations, psychiatric hospitals, industrial remains, railway settlements, forgotten institutions and landscapes still carrying the consequences of decisions made decades ago. From Port Arthur and Norfolk Island to Wittenoom, ...

Written in an accessible and authoritative voice, The Button reveals the shocking tales and sobering facts of nuclear executive authority throughout the atomic age, delivering a powerful condemnation against ever leaving explosive power this devastating under any one person's thumb. 

Every legend is a lie built to protect a bigger one. Tina Forte doesn't chase secrets — she files them, deciding what a government archive keeps buried and what finally sees daylight. Then a decades-old trucking manifest doesn't add up, and an old habit from her mother's Sunday movie afternoons connects it to a tragedy no one ever linked to a cover-up. What she uncovers isn't proof of aliens. It's something older and more human: seventy years of nuclear tests, cargo planes, and quiet disappearances, hidden behind the most convenient legend America ever told itself. Roswell wasn't the ...

On July 16, 1945, just weeks before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought about the surrender of Japan and the end of WWII, the US unleashed the world's first atomic bomb at the Trinity testing site located in the remote Tularosa Valley in New Mexico. In The First Atomic Bomb Janet Farrell Brodie explores the history of the Trinity test and those whose contributions have rarely been discussed—the men and women who constructed, served, and witnessed the first test—as well as the downwinders who suffered the consequences of radiation.

BODY SNATCHING: The Shocking Untold True Story of Project Sunshine A Cold-War Secret Buried in Bones What if the greatest nuclear cover-up wasn't an explosion - but a grave robbery? Body Snatching exposes Project Sunshine, the US-led program that harvested more than 1,500 corpses and ultimately catalogued 21,830 bone specimens - one-third taken from infants - to map radioactive fallout inside the human body. From morgues in Chicago to funeral homes in Australia, agents carved limbs from the dead, stitched the bodies to disguise the theft, and air-shipped the samples on dry ice to secret ...

In Kiribati, the ocean is not an empty distance. It is a road, a pantry, a battlefield, a boundary, and a future that cannot be ignored. Navigation and maneaba life lead into missionaries, colonial rule, blackbirding, Banaba’s phosphate, wartime Tarawa, nuclear testing, independence, the International Date Line, the Phoenix Islands, and the struggle to remain at home in a warming Pacific. These scattered islands carry global stakes. Did You Know? - Did you know traditional navigators crossed wide stretches of ocean by reading stars, swells, birds, and currents? - Did you know the maneaba ...

The most important place in American nuclear history are the Marshall Islands - an idyllic Pacific paradise that served as the staging ground for more than 60 US nuclear tests. It was here, from 1946 to 1958, that America perfected the weapon that preserved the peace of the post-war years. It was here - with the 1954 Castle Bravo test over Bikini Atoll - that America executed its largest nuclear detonation, a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima. 

At the stroke of dawn on July 16, 1945 and exactly at 15 seconds before 5:30AM, for the first ever time in the history of mankind, the sun rose twice in New Mexico within a span of 10 minutes, marking a testimony to the fact that the Laws of Physics and the Universe had indeed been reappraised successfully by the human beings. The world was changed forever following the successful explosion of the world’s first atomic bomb under the ‘Trinity’ tests conducted at Los Alamos which unleashed the nuclear age for humans. With full scale, world-wide destruction now assured within seconds at ...

MANEATER: Before the Station Went Silent... Five divers. One cage. Something in the water that isn't hunting them. That's worse. The great white shark that holds position below the Kaikane dive cage on the morning of September 14th, 2003, is twelve feet of pale white intelligence watching from thirty meters down. It has been watching people in these waters for decades. It has been watching the new research station's hydrophone signals for eleven months. And when one of the five divers makes a fatal mistake, it responds to the category — not the person — with something old and automatic ...

Part 2 of the series analyses as to how; after the transition from nuclear to the thermonuclear weapons for mankind, within less than a decade of the onset of the Atomic Age; the focus across superpowers shifted towards miniaturization of nuclear warheads and development of novel and difficult to detect & track strategic nuclear delivery vehicles (SNDVs), which witnessed the emergence of ICBMs and SLBMs, after nuclear-tipped torpedoes, thereby, further increasing the risks of nuclear warfare & holocaust manifold while simultaneously also reducing the reaction times considerably. The same ...

US President Harry Truman evidently understood the terrifying power of atomic weaponry, but no one could have realised its full potential when he ordered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Those military attacks, along with the disasters at the Fukushima and Chernobyl nuclear...

Striking and poignant, this searing exposé unravels the untold stories behind the Soviet nuclear disaster of 1986. Midnight in Chernobyl captures the truth below the molten core which irradiated the tangled web of bureaucracy determined to erase it and ended an era.