nuclear weapons

In 1962, people around the world, but especially in the United States, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, seemed to be holding their breath as they wondered if a nuclear war was about to erupt. US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later recalled that he thought October 27, 1962, "was the last Saturday I would ever see.".

In January 1945, fifteen-year-old Tygo Winter, a locksmith's son who has been forced by the Nazis to loot abandoned Dutch homes, finds himself protecting a Jewish girl he has found in a villa, and in possession of information about a German super-weapon that the Nazi high command plans to use to defeat the Allied forces in the Battle of the Bulge, information that the Resistance wants.

"This story of the virus that destroyed Iran's nuclear centrifuges ... shows that the door has been opened on a new age of warfare--one in which a digital attack can have the same destructive capability as a megaton bomb dropped from an airplane"--Provided by publisher.

Nick Horrigan made a mistake at seventeen that sent him on the run for years until he was able to build a quiet, safe life. Now his quiet life is disrupted when a SWAT team grabs him one night and takes him to a terrorist who is threatening to blow up a nuclear reactor and demanding to speak to Nick. What he learns at the nuclear plant sets him on the trail to uncovering the secrets of his past.

Presents an overview of nuclear security and essays providing differing opinions on nuclear arms control, nuclear testing, and other countries as threats to nuclear security.

"A riveting narrative of the Atomic Age--from x-rays and Marie Curie to the Nevada Test Site and the 2011 meltdown in Japan--written by the prizewinning and bestselling author of Rocket Men. 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. Written with a biographer's passion, Craig Nelson unlocks one of the great mysteries of the universe in a work that is both tragic and triumphant. 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, 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"--.

Traces the history of mankind's discovery and use of radioactivity, from the end of the nineteenth century with Marie Curie, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller, through the atomic age of the twentieth century with World War II and the atom bomb, and up to the twenty-first century and the proliferation of nuclear arms as well as the dangers of nuclear power.

Presents a minute-by-minute account of an H-bomb accident that nearly caused a nuclear disaster, examining other near misses and America's growing susceptibility to a catastrophic event.

Discusses the history of Iran's nuclear program, including the United States role in it.