Nuclear Testing

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.

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. 

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.

The INSTANT New York Times bestseller Instant Los Angeles Times bestseller Finalist, Dayton Literary Peace Prize One of NPR's Books We Love One of Newsweek Staffers' Favorite Books of the Year Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize “In Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen gives us a...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

This Very Short Introduction looks at the science of nuclear weapons and how they differ from conventional weapons. Tracing the story of the nuclear bomb, Joseph Siracusa chronicles the race to acquire the H-bomb, a thermonuclear weapon with revolutionary implications; and the history of early arms control, nuclear deterrence, and nonproliferation. He also tracks the development of nuclear weapons from the origins of the Cold War in 1945 to the end of Moscow-dominated Communism in 1991, and examines the promise and prospect of missile defense.

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 ...

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. 

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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.

USA Bestselling Author May McGoldrick writing as Jan Coffey Counting down to Chernobyl-scale disaster THE CLOCK STARTS NOW… Tick… Scientist Marion Kagan is the sole survivor after gunmen attack the facility where her team was working on a top-secret project. Wounded and trapped in a collapsed building, Marion must stop radioactive test samples from leaking out and killing millions. …tick… In a Connecticut psychiatric hospital, Marion’s twin sister, who has been in a comalike state for years, begins to thrash violently in her bed. When an experimental program is used on her to read...