The Next Nuclear Gamble

The Next Nuclear Gamble
Author: Marvin Resnikoff
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 386
Release: 1983-01-01
Genre: Radioactive waste disposal
ISBN: 9781412829731

Gambling with Armageddon

Gambling with Armageddon
Author: Martin J. Sherwin
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 624
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0525659315

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus comes the first effort to set the Cuban Missile Crisis, with its potential for nuclear holocaust, in a wider historical narrative of the Cold War—how such a crisis arose, and why at the very last possible moment it didn't happen. In this groundbreaking look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Sherwin not only gives us a riveting sometimes hour-by-hour explanation of the crisis itself, but also explores the origins, scope, and consequences of the evolving place of nuclear weapons in the post-World War II world. Mining new sources and materials, and going far beyond the scope of earlier works on this critical face-off between the United States and the Soviet Union—triggered when Khrushchev began installing missiles in Cuba at Castro's behest—Sherwin shows how this volatile event was an integral part of the wider Cold War and was a consequence of nuclear arms. Gambling with Armageddon looks in particular at the original debate in the Truman Administration about using the Atomic Bomb; the way in which President Eisenhower relied on the threat of massive retaliation to project U.S. power in the early Cold War era; and how President Kennedy, though unprepared to deal with the Bay of Pigs debacle, came of age during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here too is a clarifying picture of what was going on in Khrushchev's Soviet Union. Martin Sherwin has spent his career in the study of nuclear weapons and how they have shaped our world. Gambling with Armegeddon is an outstanding capstone to his work thus far.

Foxbats Over Dimona

Foxbats Over Dimona
Author: Isabella Ginor
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300135041

Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez’s groundbreaking history of the Six-Day War in 1967 radically changes our understanding of that conflict, casting it as a crucial arena of Cold War intrigue that has shaped the Middle East to this day. The authors, award-winning Israeli journalists and historians, have investigated newly available documents and testimonies from the former Soviet Union, cross-checked them against Israeli and Western sources, and arrived at fresh and startling conclusions. Contrary to previous interpretations, Ginor and Remez’s book shows that the Six-Day War was the result of a joint Soviet-Arab gambit to provoke Israel into a preemptive attack. The authors reveal how the Soviets received a secret Israeli message indicating that Israel, despite its official ambiguity, was about to acquire nuclear weapons. Determined to destroy Israel’s nuclear program before it could produce an atomic bomb, the Soviets then began preparing for war--well before Moscow accused Israel of offensive intent, the overt trigger of the crisis. Ginor and Remez’s startling account details how the Soviet-Arab onslaught was to be unleashed once Israel had been drawn into action and was branded as the aggressor. The Soviets had submarine-based nuclear missiles poised for use against Israel in case it already possessed and tried to use an atomic device, and the USSR prepared and actually began a marine landing on Israel’s shores backed by strategic bombers and fighter squadrons. They sent their most advanced, still-secret aircraft, the MiG-25 Foxbat, on provocative sorties over Israel’s Dimona nuclear complex to prepare the planned attack on it, and to scare Israel into making the first strike. It was only the unpredicted devastation of Israel’s response that narrowly thwarted the Soviet design.

Gambling with Armageddon

Gambling with Armageddon
Author: Martin J. Sherwin
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307386333

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus comes the first effort to set the Cuban Missile Crisis, with its potential for nuclear holocaust, in a wider historical narrative of the Cold War—how such a crisis arose and why, at the very last possible moment, it never happened. “Fresh and thrilling.... A fascinating work of history that is very relevant to today’s politics.” —Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of The Code Breaker Pulitzer Prize-winning author Martin J. Sherwin introduces a dramatic new view of how luck and leadership avoided a nuclear holocaust during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Set within the sweep of the Cold War and its nuclear history, every chapter of this gripping narrative of the origins and resolution of history’s most dangerous thirteen days offers lessons and a warning for our time. Gambling with Armageddon presents a riveting, page turning account of the crisis as well as an original exploration of the evolving place of nuclear weapons in the Post-World War II world.

The Wretched Atom

The Wretched Atom
Author: Jacob Darwin Hamblin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2021-06-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0197526926

A groundbreaking narrative of how the United States offered the promise of nuclear technology to the developing world and its gamble that other nations would use it for peaceful purposes. After the Second World War, the United States offered a new kind of atom that differed from the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This atom would cure diseases, produce new foods, make deserts bloom, and provide abundant energy for all. It was an atom destined for the formerly colonized, recently occupied, and mostly non-white parts of the world that were dubbed the "wretched of the earth" by Frantz Fanon. The "peaceful atom" had so much propaganda potential that President Dwight Eisenhower used it to distract the world from his plan to test even bigger thermonuclear weapons. His scientists said the peaceful atom would quicken the pulse of nature, speeding nations along the path of economic development and helping them to escape the clutches of disease, famine, and energy shortfalls. That promise became one of the most misunderstood political weapons of the twentieth century. It was adopted by every subsequent US president to exert leverage over other nations' weapons programs, to corner world markets of uranium and thorium, and to secure petroleum supplies. Other countries embraced it, building reactors and training experts. Atomic promises were embedded in Japan's postwar recovery, Ghana's pan-Africanism, Israel's quest for survival, Pakistan's brinksmanship with India, and Iran's pursuit of nuclear independence. As The Wretched Atom shows, promoting civilian atomic energy was an immense gamble, and it was never truly peaceful. American promises ended up exporting violence and peace in equal measure. While the United States promised peace and plenty, it planted the seeds of dependency and set in motion the creation of today's expanded nuclear club.

The Security Gamble

The Security Gamble
Author: Douglas MacLean
Publisher:
Total Pages: 202
Release: 1984
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Striking a balance between the philosophical and the pragmatic, these original essays examine the moral and strategic paradoxes found in the policy of nuclear deterrence, how uncertainty and fear can become a source of strength and how increased power of destruction might make us safer. The essays analyze the logical structure of mutually assured destruction theory and of nuclear use theory, the moral arguments of the Pastoral Letter on Deterrence of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the nuclear freeze movement and the role of experts in the formulation of nuclear policy. The authors stress the need for responsible public involvement and the obligation of citizens to be informed on these questions. ISBN 0-8476-7329-4 : $29.95.

Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Author: Serhii Plokhy
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393540820

"The definitive history.…With his masterly book, Mr. Plokhy has sounded a warning bell." — The Economist A harrowing account of the Cuban missile crisis and how the US and USSR came to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today’s world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis. Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground. In breathtaking detail, Plokhy vividly recounts the young JFK being played by the canny Khrushchev; the hotheaded Castro willing to defy the USSR and threatening to align himself with China; the Soviet troops on the ground clearing jungle foliage in the tropical heat, and desperately trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba, which were nonetheless easily spotted by U-2 spy planes; and the hair-raising near misses at sea that nearly caused a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine to fire its weapons. More often than not, the Americans and Soviets misread each other, operated under false information, and came perilously close to nuclear catastrophe. Despite these errors, nuclear war was ultimately avoided for one central reason: fear, and the realization that any escalation on either the Soviets’ or the Americans’ part would lead to mutual destruction. Drawing on a range of Soviet archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, as well as White House tapes, Plokhy masterfully illustrates the drama and anxiety of those tense days, and provides a way for us to grapple with the problems posed in our present day.

Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons

Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons
Author: Ward Wilson
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 054785787X

Expanded from an article that created a stir in foreign policy circles, this book shows why five central arguments promoting nuclear weapons are, in essence, myths.

Nuclear Roulette

Nuclear Roulette
Author: Gar Smith
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2012
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 160358434X

Nuclear power is not clean, cheap, or safe. With Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, the nuclear industry's record of catastrophic failures now averages one major disaster every decade. After three US-designed plants exploded in Japan, many countries moved to abandon reactors for renewables. In the United States, however, powerful corporations and a compliant government still defend nuclear power-while promising billion-dollar bailouts to operators. Each new disaster demonstrates that the nuclear industry and governments lie to "avoid panic," to preserve the myth of "safe, clean" nuclear power, and to sustain government subsidies. Tokyo and Washington both covered up Fukushima's radiation risks and-when confronted with damning evidence-simply raised the levels of "acceptable" risk to match the greater levels of exposure. Nuclear Roulette dismantles the core arguments behind the nuclear-industrial complex's "Nuclear Renaissance." While some critiques are familiar-nuclear power is too costly, too dangerous, and too unstable-others are surprising: Nuclear Roulette exposes historic links to nuclear weapons, impacts on Indigenous lands and lives, and the ways in which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission too often takes its lead from industry, rewriting rules to keep failing plants in compliance. Nuclear Roulette cites NRC records showing how corporations routinely defer maintenance and lists resulting "near-misses" in the US, which average more than one per month. Nuclear Roulette chronicles the problems of aging reactors, uncovers the costly challenge of decommissioning, explores the industry's greatest seismic risks-not on California's quake-prone coast but in the Midwest and Southeast-and explains how solar flares could black out power grids, causing the world's 400-plus reactors to self-destruct. This powerful exposé concludes with a roundup of proven and potential energy solutions that can replace nuclear technology with a "Renewable Renaissance," combined with conservation programs that can cleanse the air, and cool the planet.

Climate Gamble

Climate Gamble
Author: Rauli Partanen
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2017-03-09
Genre:
ISBN: 9789527139110

This is the updated and improved 2017 edition of Climate Gamble. "Climate Gamble - Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?" is a thought-provoking, short and easy to read book on one of the biggest problems of our time, climate change, and one of its most misunderstood and misrepresented solution, nuclear power. From the back cover: Humankind has won many great victories in the fight against climate change. However, these victories are rarely acknowledged or reported. Is this because they were won with nuclear power? Preventing dangerous climate change requires world energy production to be almost completely free from fossil fuels by 2050. At the same time, energy consumption keeps growing, as the population increases and those mired in poverty try to create better lives for themselves. With almost 87 percent of our energy produced with fossil fuels, the challenge is unprecedented in both its scale and urgency. International organizations agree that meeting this challenge will require the use of all the tools at our disposal: Renewable energy, more energy conservation and better efficiency, carbon capture and storage - and nuclear power. At the same time, the global environment and energy discussion is largely dominated by a vocal opinion that climate challenge and global poverty should be conquered with nothing else than renewables, energy conservation and energy efficiency. This book explains how this opinion is largely based on very selective reading of relevant studies and reports, wishful thinking about the powers of technological miracles, and even straight-out falsification of statistics and misrepresentation of facts. Does the anti-nuclear movement really help to give people objective, relevant information they need to make up their minds about zero-carbon energy production, the scale of the challenge, and in particular the up- and downsides of nuclear power? Or are they just spreading fear and uncertainty, while making a huge gamble with the climate, potentially endangering both human civilization and the Earth's ecosystems?