12 Seconds of Silence

12 Seconds of Silence
Author: Jamie Holmes
Publisher: Mariner Books
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2020
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1328460126

The riveting story of the American scientists, tinkerers, and nerds who solved one of the biggest puzzles of World War II--and developed one of the most powerful weapons of the war.​ 12 Seconds of Silence is the remarkable, lost story of how a rag tag group of American scientists overcame one of the toughest problems of World War II: Shooting things out of the sky. Working in a secretive organization known as Section T, a team of physicists, engineers, and everyday Joes and Janes created one of the world's first "smart weapons"--the proximity fuse. The tiny gadget allowed an artillery shell to "know" when to explode to bring down an aircraft. Against overwhelming odds and in a race against time, mustering every scrap of resource, ingenuity, and insight, the scientists of Section T would eventually save countless lives, rescue the city of London from the onslaught of a Nazi superweapon, and help bring about the Axis defeat. A holy grail sought after by Allied and Axis powers alike, the fuse ranks with the atomic bomb as one of the most revolutionary technologies of the Second World War. Until now, its tale was largely untold. For fans of Erik Larson and Ben Macintyre, set amidst the fog of espionage, dueling spies, and the dawn of an age when science would determine the fate of the world, 12 Seconds of Silence is a tribute to the extraordinary wartime mobilization of American science and the ultimate can-do story.

Technology in Modern German History

Technology in Modern German History
Author: Karsten Uhl
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2022-01-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350053228

People often associate postwar Germany with technology and with its products of mass consumption, such as luxury cars. Even pop music, most notably Kraftwerk (literally 'power station') with songs such as Autobahn, Radioactivity or We are the Robots, disseminates the stereotype of a close link between German culture and technology. Technology in Modern German History explores various forms of technology in 200 years of German history and explains how technology has been fundamental to the shaping of modern Germany. The book investigates the role technology played in transforming Germany's culture, society and politics during the 19th and 20th centuries. Key topics covered include the different stages of industrialization, the growth of networked cities, and the triumph of a teleological narrative of technology as progress. Moreover, it provides a critical revision of the history of high technology which reveals how high-tech euphoria determined certain paths in history regardless of whether the respective technology proved to be successful. In its second part, the volume introduces new avenues in scholarship. Karsten Uhl examines neglected areas, such as rural technologies or the often-overlooked importance of everyday technologies: How did consumers or workers use new technologies? How did they appropriate and modify them? Lastly, the book considers the final decades of the 20th century and asks if they provided a significant new quality of technological change: To what degree and effects did computerization transform professional and private life in Germany? In culture and politics, reinforced by the German variety of environmentalism, the idea of progress was challenged, as the once prevailing vision of progress gave way to new apprehensions of uncertainty evident to this day. Technology in Modern German History brings fascinating insight into a much neglected area of German history for students and scholars alike.

Designed to Kill: The Case Against Weapons Research

Designed to Kill: The Case Against Weapons Research
Author: John Forge
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2012-12-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9400757360

The pilot-less drones, smart bombs and other high-tech weapons on display in recent conflicts are all the outcome of weapons research. However, the kind of scientific and technological endeavour has been around for a long time, producing not only the armaments of Nazi Germany and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, but the catapults used in ancient Greece and Rome and the assault rifles used by child soldiers in Africa. In this book John Forge examines such weapons research and asks whether it is morally acceptable to undertake such an activity. He argues that it is in fact morally wrong to take part in weapons research as its primary purpose is to produce the means to harm others, and moreover he argues that all attempts to then justify participation in weapons research do not stand up to scrutiny. This book has wide appeal in fields of philosophy and related areas, as well to a more general audience who are puzzled about the rate at which new weapons are accumulated.

Our Germans

Our Germans
Author: Brian E. Crim
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2018-01-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1421424401

A gripping history of one of the United States' most controversial Cold War intelligence operations. Project Paperclip brought hundreds of German scientists and engineers, including aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, to the United States in the first decade after World War II. More than the freighters full of equipment or the documents recovered from caves and hastily abandoned warehouses, the German brains who designed and built the V-2 rocket and other "wonder weapons" for the Third Reich proved invaluable to America's emerging military-industrial complex. Whether they remained under military employment, transitioned to civilian agencies like NASA, or sought more lucrative careers with corporations flush with government contracts, German specialists recruited into the Paperclip program assumed enormously influential positions within the labyrinthine national security state. Drawing on recently declassified documents from intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, the FBI, and the State Department, Brian E. Crim's Our Germans examines the process of integrating German scientists into a national security state dominated by the armed services and defense industries. Crim explains how the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency enticed targeted scientists, whitewashed the records of Nazis and war criminals, and deceived government agencies about the content of security investigations. Exploring the vicious bureaucratic rivalries that erupted over the wisdom, efficacy, and morality of pursuing Paperclip, Our Germans reveals how some Paperclip proponents and scientists influenced the perception of the rival Soviet threat by volunteering inflated estimates of Russian intentions and technical capabilities. As it describes the project's embattled legacy, Our Germans reflects on the myriad ways that Paperclip has been remembered in culture and national memory. As this engaging book demonstrates, whether characterized as an expedient Cold War program born from military necessity or a dishonorable episode, the project ultimately reflects American ambivalence about the military-industrial complex and the viability of an "ends justifies the means" solution to external threats.

German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie

German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie
Author: Monique Laney
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0300198035

This thought-provoking study by historian Monique Laney focuses on the U.S. government-assisted integration of German rocket specialists and their families into a small southern community at the end of World War II. In 1950, Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket experts relocated to Huntsville, Alabama, a town that would celebrate the team, despite their essential role in the Nazi war effort a decade earlier, for their contributions to the U.S. Army missile program and later to NASA's space program. Based on oral histories, provided by members of the African American and Jewish communities, the rocketeers' families, and co-workers, friends, and neighbors, Laney's book demonstrates how the histories of German Nazism and Jim Crow in the American South intertwine in narratives about the past. This is a critical reassessment of a singular time that links the Cold War, the “Space Race,” and the Civil Rights era while addressing important issues of transnational science and technology, and asking Americans to consider their country's own history of racism when reflecting on the Nazi past.

The Map in the Machine

The Map in the Machine
Author: Luis F. Alvarez Leon
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2024-04-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520389336

Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism, we need to grasp how advances in geospatial technologies underpin the construction, operation, and refinement of markets for digital goods and services. In The Map in the Machine, Luis F. Alvarez Leon examines these advances, from MapQuest and Google Maps to the rise of IP geolocation, ridesharing, and a new Earth Observation satellite ecosystem. He develops a geographical theory of digital capitalism centered on the processes of location, valuation, and marketization to provide a new vantage point from which to better understand, and intervene in, the dominant techno-economic paradigm of our time. By centering the spatiality of digital capitalism, Alvarez Leon shows how this system is the product not of seemingly intangible information clouds but rather of a vast array of technologies, practices, and infrastructures deeply rooted in place, mediated by geography, and open to contestation and change.

Fatherland

Fatherland
Author: Robert Harris
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 404
Release: 1993
Genre: Adventure stories
ISBN: 0061006629

What would have happened if Hitler had won World War II?

Operation Valhalla

Operation Valhalla
Author: Friedrich Kittler
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2021-03-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478013184

Operation Valhalla collects eighteen texts by German media theorist Friedrich Kittler on the close connections between war and media technology. In these essays, public lectures, interviews, literary analyses, and autobiographical musings, Kittler outlines how war has been a central driver of media's evolution, from Prussia's wars against Napoleon to the so-called War on Terror. Covering an eclectic array of topics, he charts the intertwined military and theatrical histories of the searchlight and the stage lamp, traces the microprocessor's genealogy back to the tank, shows how rapid-fire guns brought about new standards for optics and acoustics, and reads Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to upset established claims about the relationship between war, technology, and history in the twentieth century. Throughout, Operation Valhalla foregrounds the outsize role of war in media history as well as Kittler's importance as a daring and original thinker.

Strategic Review

Strategic Review
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 492
Release: 1974
Genre: Strategy
ISBN:

... dedicated to the advancement and understanding of those principles and practices, military and political, which serve the vital security interests of the United States.

The Red Rockets' Glare

The Red Rockets' Glare
Author: Asif A. Siddiqi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2010-02-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521897602

An academic study on the birth of the Soviet space program, situating the birth of cosmic enthusiasm within Russian and Soviet history.