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Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize

In Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen gives us a vivid picture of what could happen if our nuclear guardians fail...Terrifying.--Wall Street Journal

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.

Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in--where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world's end requires massive decisions made on seconds' notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War: A Scenario examines the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. It is essential reading, and unlike any other book in its depth and urgency.

**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.

The Great American Gamble examines the past, present, and prospective future of U.S. deterrence theory, strategic forces, nuclear weapons and policy. It provides a detailed explanation of the competing schools of deterrence theory that emerged during the late 1950's and early 1960's. Based on an extensive review of previously classified documents, it demonstrates how and why U.S. Government policies came to adhere to the guidelines established by the theory of deterrence popularly called the balance of terror. Dr. Payne presents the assumptions, judgments and hopes that led U.S. policy makers in consecutive Republican and Democratic administrations to that choice. Acceptance of a balance of terror as official policy was challenged on occasion during the Cold War under both Democratic and Republican administrations, but it persisted as the lodestar for U.S. strategic policies. Most Americans presumed they were defended, but U.S. Government choices were predicated on the belief, as noted by Henry Kissinger, that vulnerability contributed to peace, and invulnerability contributed to war. Looking forward, the key question is to what extent the basic tenets of Cold War academic deterrence theory provide useful guidance to contemporary strategic policy given contemporary threats and conditions? The conclusion offered herein is that familiar Cold War guidelines are a manifestly imprudent basis for U.S. policy. Much of what we believed we knew about deterrence during the Cold War now appears to have been more fleeting hope than wisdom.

Professor Keith Payne has written a bold analysis of our historical context that truly is a unique contribution to the American nuclear debate. His work here considers and describes most carefully what must be judged a global challenge to which there is no fully prudent solution. Russia is not going away anytime soon, though indeed already it is somewhat overshadowed by the large dragon to the East. In order to make sense clearly of what is happening, and why, Professor Payne makes admirable use of the familiar binary opposition of Realism and Idealism. He employs these for the keys they provide readily to help explain what otherwise typically is an unduly forbidding debate among experts.

The Oscar-shortlisted documentary Command and Control, directed by Robert Kenner, finds its origins in Eric Schlosser's book and continues to explore the little-known history of the management and safety concerns of America's nuclear aresenal.

A devastatingly lucid and detailed new history of nuclear weapons in the U.S. Fascinating. --Lev Grossman, TIME Magazine

Perilous and gripping . . . Schlosser skillfully weaves together an engrossing account of both the science and the politics of nuclear weapons safety. --San Francisco Chronicle

A myth-shattering exposé of America's nuclear weapons

Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America's nuclear arsenal. A groundbreaking account of accidents, near misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: How do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them? That question has never been resolved--and Schlosser reveals how the combination of human fallibility and technological complexity still poses a grave risk to mankind. While the harms of global warming increasingly dominate the news, the equally dangerous yet more immediate threat of nuclear weapons has been largely forgotten.

Written with the vibrancy of a first-rate thriller, Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a nuclear missile silo in rural Arkansas with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years. It depicts the urgent effort by American scientists, policy makers, and military officers to ensure that nuclear weapons can't be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. At the heart of the book lies the struggle, amid the rolling hills and small farms of Damascus, Arkansas, to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States.

Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with people who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view. Through the details of a single accident, Schlosser illustrates how an unlikely event can become unavoidable, how small risks can have terrible consequences, and how the most brilliant minds in the nation can only provide us with an illusion of control. Audacious, gripping, and unforgettable, Command and Control is a tour de force of investigative journalism, an eye-opening look at the dangers of America's nuclear age.

The Plutonium Files is the shocking exposé of the US government's medical experiments on unwitting citizens during the Cold War. Americans recoiled when they learned of the brutal experiments conducted by Nazi doctors. But as the world was learning about those horrors, US scientists were injecting eighteen patients in hospital wards with plutonium, a deadly substance used to make the atomic bomb. The patients were given code numbers and went to their graves without knowing what had been done to them.
In The Plutonium Files, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Eileen Welsome describes how she uncovered the identities of these patients and goes on to chronicle the web of deceit that enabled the experiment to remain largely unknown for fifty years. It's a searing, cautionary tale about what can happen behind the cloak of secrecy
In this new edition, the book returns to the July 16, 1945, Trinity Test in southern New Mexico. Trinity was not only the world's first atomic bomb, but the world's first dirty bomb. Survivors and their descendants in the path of the fallout experienced a huge increase in radiation-linked cancers and are still fighting for reparations.
The Plutonium Files also traces the murky origins of other radiation experiments. Like the plutonium injectees, the subjects were surreptitiously followed for years. They included children in Massachusetts, pregnant women in Tennessee, and prisoners in Oregon and Washington.

A fierce expose of governmental duplicity and dangerous science ...The literature on the official crimes of the Cold War is large and growing. Welsome's stunning book adds much to that literature, and it makes for sobering reading.

Kirkus Reviews

From the author of 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.

Fred Kaplan, hailed by The New York Times as a rare combination of defense intellectual and pugnacious reporter, takes us into the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Tank in the Pentagon, and the vast chambers of Strategic Command to bring us the untold stories--based on exclusive interviews and previously classified documents--of how America's presidents and generals have thought about, threatened, broached, and just barely avoided nuclear war from the dawn of the atomic age until today.

Kaplan's historical research and deep reporting will stand as the permanent record of politics. Discussing theories that have dominated nightmare scenarios from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kaplan presents the unthinkable in terms of mass destruction and demonstrates how the nuclear war reality will not go away, regardless of the dire consequences.

One high-altitude nuclear detonation will create a massive electromagnetic pulse that can bring down the U.S. national power grid and keep it down for many months, perhaps a year or longer.

Americans would instantly find themselves without running water, food, refrigeration, lights, phones, functioning toilets and sewage systems, air conditioning and heating, transportation (no gasoline), and without access to their bank accounts or medical services.

A nuclear high-altitude electromagnetic pulse will damage and destroy the modern electronic devices required to run U.S. critical national infrastructure; it will also disable the Emergency Power Systems and active Emergency Core Cooling Systems at dozens of U.S. nuclear power plants, causing the meltdown of their nuclear reactors.

All legislative efforts to protect the grid and critical national infrastructure from electromagnetic pulse have been blocked by the electric and nuclear utilities, as well as by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Did Nostradamus foresee the rise of Donald Trump? Is it likely that a 16th century astrologer would pay any attention to a president of the United States? Yes, without a doubt. Why? Because Donald Trump in his first term in office set into motion the probable downfall of democracy and put in place the structure on which to build a Neo-Nazi autocratic state. This is critically important to the future of the entire world and Nostradamus would certainly have taken note of it. Did he also forecast Trump as being the 3rd Antichrist? And would Trump be somehow involved in the waging of World War III? These questions are answered in this book.

Unlike most other books about Nostradamus, this book is arranged so that the reader can easily find the pertinent predictions and not have to wade through hundreds of other non-related forecasts of future events. There are 3 categories: 1) the rise of Donald Trump, 2) identifying the coming Antichrist and 3) the start of World War III. Each section contains all of the relevant predictions that Nostradamus made on these topics.

Nostradamus knew the future - to a point. He also realized that the future is changeable and so he wrote of alternative possibilities as to who the Antichrist might be and how world war III might begin. But one of these forecasts will be the accurate one. And by reading this book you will be able to recognize the accurate forewarning when you see that the ongoing world events taking place fit one of the patterns that Nostradamus had laid out. You will be prepared for the coming disaster.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2020 New York Times bestselling author Lesley M.M. Blume reveals how one courageous American reporter uncovered one of the deadliest cover-ups of the 20th century--the true effects of the atom bomb--potentially saving millions of lives. Just days after the United States decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. But even before the surrender, the US government and military had begun a secret propaganda and information suppression campaign to hide the devastating nature of these experimental weapons. The cover-up intensified as Occupation forces closed the atomic cities to Allied reporters, preventing leaks about the horrific long-term effects of radiation which would kill thousands during the months after the blast. For nearly a year the cover-up worked--until New Yorker journalist John Hersey got into Hiroshima and managed to report the truth to the world. As Hersey and his editors prepared his article for publication, they kept the story secret--even from most of their New Yorker colleagues. When the magazine published Hiroshima in August 1946, it became an instant global sensation, and inspired pervasive horror about the hellish new threat that America had unleashed. Since 1945, no nuclear weapons have ever been deployed in war partly because Hersey alerted the world to their true, devastating impact. This knowledge has remained among the greatest deterrents to using them since the end of World War II. Released on the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Fallout is an engrossing detective story, as well as an important piece of hidden history that shows how one heroic scoop saved--and can still save--the world.

The Plutonium Files is the shocking exposé of the US government's medical experiments on unwitting citizens during the Cold War. Americans recoiled when they learned of the brutal experiments conducted by Nazi doctors. But as the world was learning about those horrors, US scientists were injecting eighteen patients in hospital wards with plutonium, a deadly substance used to make the atomic bomb. The patients were given code numbers and went to their graves without knowing what had been done to them.
In The Plutonium Files, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Eileen Welsome describes how she uncovered the identities of these patients and goes on to chronicle the web of deceit that enabled the experiment to remain largely unknown for fifty years. It's a searing, cautionary tale about what can happen behind the cloak of secrecy
In this new edition, the book returns to the July 16, 1945, Trinity Test in southern New Mexico. Trinity was not only the world's first atomic bomb, but the world's first dirty bomb. Survivors and their descendants in the path of the fallout experienced a huge increase in radiation-linked cancers and are still fighting for reparations.
The Plutonium Files also traces the murky origins of other radiation experiments. Like the plutonium injectees, the subjects were surreptitiously followed for years. They included children in Massachusetts, pregnant women in Tennessee, and prisoners in Oregon and Washington.

A fierce expose of governmental duplicity and dangerous science ...The literature on the official crimes of the Cold War is large and growing. Welsome's stunning book adds much to that literature, and it makes for sobering reading.

Kirkus Reviews

Almost 145,000 Americans fled their homes in and around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in late March 1979, hoping to save themselves from an invisible enemy: radiation. The reactor at the nearby Three Mile Island nuclear power plant had gone into partial meltdown, and scientists feared an explosion that could spread radiation throughout the eastern United States. Thankfully, the explosion never took place--but the accident left deep scars in the American psyche, all but ending the nation's love affair with nuclear power.

In Atoms and Ashes, Serhii Plokhy recounts the dramatic history of Three Mile Island and five more accidents that that have dogged the nuclear industry in its military and civil incarnations: the disastrous fallout caused by the testing of the hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Atoll in 1954; the Kyshtym nuclear disaster in the USSR, which polluted a good part of the Urals; the Windscale fire, the worst nuclear accident in the UK's history; back to the USSR with Chernobyl, the result of a flawed reactor design leading to the exodus of 350,000 people; and, most recently, Fukushima in Japan, triggered by an earthquake and a tsunami, a disaster on a par with Chernobyl and whose clean-up will not take place in our lifetime.

Through the stories of these six terrifying incidents, Plokhy explores the risks of nuclear power, both for military and peaceful purposes, while offering a vivid account of how individuals and governments make decisions under extraordinary circumstances. Today, there are 440 nuclear reactors operating throughout the world, with nuclear power providing 10 percent of global electricity. Yet as the world seeks to reduce carbon emissions to combat climate change, the question arises: Just how safe is nuclear energy?

The first in Winston Churchill's monumental six-volume account of the struggle between the Allied Powers in Europe against Germany and the Axis during World War II.

Told from the unique viewpoint of the former British prime minister, The Gathering Storm is also the story of one nation's heroic role in the fight against tyranny.

Having learned a lesson at Munich they would never forget, the British refused to make peace with Hitler, defying him even after France had fallen and it seemed as though the Nazis were unstoppable. What lends this work its tension and power is Churchill's inclusion of primary source material. We are presented with not only Churchill's retrospective analysis of the war, but also memos, letters, orders, speeches, and telegrams, day-by-day accounts of reactions as the drama intensifies. We listen as strategies and counterstrategies unfold in response to Hitler's conquest of Europe, planned invasion of England, and assault on Russia. Together they give a mesmerizing account of the crucial decisions made as the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

The Gathering Storm covers the Treaty of Versailles, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the capitulation of Munich, and the entry of Britain into the war. This book makes clear Churchill's feeling that the Second World War was a largely senseless but unavoidable conflict--and shows why Churchill earned the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, in part because of this awe-inspiring work.

A mesmerizing account that illuminates not just the Napoleonic wars but all of modern history . . . It reads like a novel (Lynn Hunt, Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History, UCLA).

The twentieth century is usually seen as the century of total war. But as the historian David Bell argues in this landmark work, the phenomenon actually began much earlier, in the era of muskets, cannons, and sailing ships--in the age of Napoleon.

In a sweeping, evocative narrative, Bell takes us from campaigns of extermination in the blood-soaked fields of western France to savage street fighting in ruined Spanish cities to central European battlefields where tens of thousands died in a single day. Between 1792 and 1815, Europe plunged into an abyss of destruction.

It was during this time, Bell argues, that our modern attitudes toward war were born. Ever since, the dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of total war have been bound tightly together in the Western world--right down to the present day, in which the hopes for an end to history after the Cold War quickly gave way to renewed fears of full-scale slaughter.

With a historian's keen insight and a journalist's flair for detail, Bell exposes the surprising parallels between Napoleon's day and our own--including the way that ambitious wars of liberation, such as the one in Iraq, can degenerate into a gruesome guerrilla conflict. The result is a book that is as timely and important as it is unforgettable.

Thoughtful and original . . . Bell has mapped what is a virtually new field of inquiry: the culture of war.--Steven L. Kaplan, Goldwin Smith Professor of European History, Cornell University

The first systematic look at the different strategies that states employ in their pursuit of nuclear weapons

Much of the work on nuclear proliferation has focused on why states pursue nuclear weapons. The question of how states pursue nuclear weapons has received little attention. Seeking the Bomb is the first book to analyze this topic by examining which strategies of nuclear proliferation are available to aspirants, why aspirants select one strategy over another, and how this matters to international politics.

Looking at a wide range of nations, from India and Japan to the Soviet Union and North Korea to Iraq and Iran, Vipin Narang develops an original typology of proliferation strategies--hedging, sprinting, sheltered pursuit, and hiding. Each strategy of proliferation provides different opportunities for the development of nuclear weapons, while at the same time presenting distinct vulnerabilities that can be exploited to prevent states from doing so. Narang delves into the crucial implications these strategies have for nuclear proliferation and international security. Hiders, for example, are especially disruptive since either they successfully attain nuclear weapons, irrevocably altering the global power structure, or they are discovered, potentially triggering serious crises or war, as external powers try to halt or reverse a previously clandestine nuclear weapons program.

As the international community confronts the next generation of potential nuclear proliferators, Seeking the Bomb explores how global conflict and stability are shaped by the ruthlessly pragmatic ways states choose strategies of proliferation.

Before the Manhattan Project, before nuclear warfare and the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was the twentieth century's great scientific quest to fathom the secrets of the atom.

The unlikely story of an Antipodean friendship that changed the world forever.

Centered on the inter-war years - within the ivy clad walls of Cambridge University's famed Cavendish Laboratory, amid the windswept valleys of north Wales, and in the industrial heartland of Birmingham - The Basis of Everything is the story of the coming of the atomic bomb, and how the unlikely union of two scientists - Ernest Rutherford, the son of a New Zealand farmer, and Mark Oliphant, a peace-loving vegetarian from a tiny Australian hills village - would change the world.

The story that bonds Ernest Rutherford and Mark Oliphant is as extraordinary as it is unlikely. They were kindred souls, schooled and steeped in the furthest frontiers of Britain's empire, whose restless intellect and tireless conviction fused in the crucible of discovery at Cambridge University's celebrated Cavendish Laboratory, at a time when nature's deepest secrets were being revealed. Their brilliance illuminated the sub-atomic recesses of the natural world and, as a direct result, set loose the power of nuclear fusion.

It was a heartfelt, enduring partnership, born at the University of Adelaide's modest physics department and then flourishing further in the confines of the Cavendish before ultimately driving the famed Manhattan Project, which produced the world's first nuclear weapons, unleashed to such devastating effect on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Rutherford and Oliphant were men with a shared devotion to pure science, who, through circumstance and necessity, found themselves betrayed as instruments of wars they detested but were duty-bound to prosecute. Consequently, their influence was pivotal in the last great global conflict the world witnessed and in engendering the thermonuclear threat that has held the planet hostage ever since. Yet their pioneering work also lives on in a vast array of innovations seeded by nuclear physics, from radiocarbon dating and TV screens to life-saving diagnostic-imaging devices.

PRAISE FOR THE BASIS OF EVERYTHING

In The Basis of Everything, journalist Andrew Ramsey has succeeded in telling a story so detailed and compelling that even knowing where it leads does not distract from the journey. The Sydney Morning Herald