Supplying the Nuclear Arsenal

Author: Rodney P. Carlisle
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421435918
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Book Description
Originally published in 1996. Although the history of commercial-power nuclear reactors is well known, the story of the government reactors that produce weapons-grade plutonium and tritium has been shrouded in secrecy. Supplying the Nuclear Arsenal looks at the origin and development of these production reactors, Rodney Carlisle and Joan Zenzen describe a fifty-year government effort no less complex, expensive, and technologically demanding than the Polaris or Apollo programs—yet one about which most Americans know virtually nothing. Carlisle and Zenzen describe the evolution of the early reactors, the atomic weapons establishment that surrounded them, and the sometimes bitter struggles between business and political constituencies for their share of "nuclear pork." They show how, since the 1980s, aging production reactors have increased the risk of radioactive contamination of the atmosphere and water table. And they describe how the Department of Energy mounted a massive effort to find the right design for a new generation of reactors, only to abandon that effort with the end of the Cold War. Today, all American production reactors remain closed. Due to short half-life, the nation's supply of tritium, crucial to modern weapons, is rapidly dwindling. As countries like Iraq and North Korea threaten to join the nuclear club, the authors contend, the United States needs to revitalize tritium production capacity in order to maintain a viable nuclear deterrent. Meanwhile, as slowly decaying artifacts of the Cold War, the closed production reactors at Hanford, Washington, and Savannah River, South Carolina, loom ominously over the landscape.

Supplying the Nuclear Arsenal

Author: Rodney P. Carlisle
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781421435923
Category : Nuclear fuels
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description

Supplying the Nuclear Arsenal

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Book Description
This book focuses on the lineage of America's production reactors, those three at Hanford and their descendants, the reactors behind America's nuclear weapons. The work will take only occasional sideways glances at the collateral lines of descent, the reactor cousins designed for experimental purposes, ship propulsion, and electric power generation. Over the decades from 1942 through 1992, fourteen American production reactors made enough plutonium to fuel a formidable arsenal of more than twenty thousand weapons. In the last years of that period, planners, nuclear engineers, and managers struggled over designs for the next generation of production reactors. The story of fourteen individual machines and of the planning effort to replace them might appear relatively narrow. Yet these machines lay at the heart of the nation's nuclear weapons complex. The story of these machines is the story of arming the winning weapon, supplying the nuclear arms race. This book is intended to capture the history of the first fourteen production reactors, and associated design work, in the face of the end of the Cold War.

Command and Control

Author: Eric Schlosser
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101638664
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 702

Book Description
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.

Uranium Enrichment and Nuclear Weapon Proliferation

Author: Allan S. Krass
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100020054X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Book Description
Originally published in 1983, this book presents both the technical and political information necessary to evaluate the emerging threat to world security posed by recent advances in uranium enrichment technology. Uranium enrichment has played a relatively quiet but important role in the history of efforts by a number of nations to acquire nuclear weapons and by a number of others to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. For many years the uranium enrichment industry was dominated by a single method, gaseous diffusion, which was technically complex, extremely capital-intensive, and highly inefficient in its use of energy. As long as this remained true, only the richest and most technically advanced nations could afford to pursue the enrichment route to weapon acquisition. But during the 1970s this situation changed dramatically. Several new and far more accessible enrichment techniques were developed, stimulated largely by the anticipation of a rapidly growing demand for enrichment services by the world-wide nuclear power industry. This proliferation of new techniques, coupled with the subsequent contraction of the commercial market for enriched uranium, has created a situation in which uranium enrichment technology might well become the most important contributor to further nuclear weapon proliferation. Some of the issues addressed in this book are: A technical analysis of the most important enrichment techniques in a form that is relevant to analysis of proliferation risks; A detailed projection of the world demand for uranium enrichment services; A summary and critique of present institutional non-proliferation arrangements in the world enrichment industry, and An identification of the states most likely to pursue the enrichment route to acquisition of nuclear weapons.

No Use

Author: Thomas M. Nichols
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812245660
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
For more than forty years, the United States has maintained a public commitment to nuclear disarmament, and every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama has gradually reduced the size of America's nuclear forces. Yet even now, over two decades after the end of the Cold War, the United States maintains a huge nuclear arsenal on high alert and ready for war. The Americans, like the Russians, the Chinese, and other major nuclear powers, continue to retain a deep faith in the political and military value of nuclear force, and this belief remains enshrined at the center of U.S. defense policy regardless of the radical changes that have taken place in international politics. In No Use, national security scholar Thomas M. Nichols offers a lucid, accessible reexamination of the role of nuclear weapons and their prominence in U.S. security strategy. Nichols explains why strategies built for the Cold War have survived into the twenty-first century, and he illustrates how America's nearly unshakable belief in the utility of nuclear arms has hindered U.S. and international attempts to slow the nuclear programs of volatile regimes in North Korea and Iran. From a solid historical foundation, Nichols makes the compelling argument that to end the danger of worldwide nuclear holocaust, the United States must take the lead in abandoning unrealistic threats of nuclear force and then create a new and more stable approach to deterrence for the twenty-first century.

A Technical History of America's Nuclear Arms

Author: Peter GOETZ
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781719831963
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 555

Book Description
Nuclear publications prior to the recently published e-book, A Technical History of America's Nuclear Weapons - Their Design, Operation, Deployment, and Delivery, have concentrated mostly on specific topics such as weapon physics, testing, warheads, delivery systems, deployments, or doctrine. The e-book was intended to provide "one stop shopping" with a broad treatment of the subject. In providing a wide scope, some depth was sacrificed in order to produce a volume of manageable size. In republishing the A Technical History of America's Nuclear Weapons - Their Design, Operation, Deployment and Delivery e-book as a paperback, it was necessary to divide it into two volumes due to limitations of the printing process. While unfortunate that the book had to be published in two volumes, it allowed the author to lavishly illustrate each chapter of the book.For the convenience of the Reader, A History of America's Nuclear Weapons: Volume I - Introduction and Weapon Systems Through 1960 has a leading section that places the American nuclear arsenal into its historical context and provides the basic technical background needed to understand the weapon's mechanisms. Included are chapters on weapon design, the military-industrial complex, and stockpile logistics. These are followed by a discussion intended to clearly convey what would have happened if nuclear weapons were ever put to use. The introduction closes with a review of early warning and targeting, nuclear war plans, the deployment of nuclear forces, and the evolution of strategic doctrine during the period of the Cold War. It also includes sections on non-proliferation and the current management of the US Nuclear Stockpile. This story is told in a straightforward easy to understand manner. The use of equations is avoided like the plague. Albert Einstein declared that if you can't tell a story without the use of mathematics, you really didn't understand your subject matter.The main body of this book examines American nuclear weapons and delivery systems in a rough chronological order. It treats some weapons individually, whereas it presents others in functional or family groupings. It also combines development histories with engineering descriptions to illustrate the performance characteristics of the weapons and the design challenges that faced their developers. Basic data about weapon operation, delivery systems, and deployments are also included. Volume I: -Has about 1,000 technical references, grouped into related categories-Uses official Military Characteristic (parts) Numbers for components where available, a very useful tool for internet searches-Provides detailed information on the recovery of plutonium from spent fuel rods and the casting of plutonium cores-Outlines the evolution of nuclear pits: solid, composite, levitated, hollow, boosted, linear and linear boosted.-Provides information on the explosives and methods used to compress plutonium cores on a weapon by weapon basis, especially the plastic bonded explosives (PBX) produced at the Holston Army Ammunition Plant, Kingsport, Tennessee -Outlines the development of the batteries and the arming, fuzing and firing (X-Unit) systems used in various nuclear MARKs and MODs-Outlines the internal and external electronic neutron initiation systems used in various nuclear MARKs and MODs-Follows the race to develop hydrogen bombs and investigates the first generation of multi-megaton bombs and their delivery aircraft.Preprints of this paperback were sent to the NNSA, DOE, and DOD for review, thus, the Author can guarantee that the men-in-black will never come to your home if you purchase this book. He cannot guarantee, however, that the ballistic missile submarine that a Reader constructs in a backyard pool will not implode before it reaches its specified collapse depth or that a thermonuclear bomb reverse engineered will be a dud.

Arsenals of Folly

Author: Richard Rhodes
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375713948
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes delivers a riveting account of the nuclear arms race and the Cold War. In the Reagan-Gorbachev era, the United States and the Soviet Union came within minutes of nuclear war, until Gorbachev boldly launched a campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons, setting the stage for the 1986 Reykjavik summit and the incredible events that followed. In this thrilling, authoritative narrative, Richard Rhodes draws on personal interviews with both Soviet and U.S. participants and a wealth of new documentation to unravel the compelling, shocking story behind this monumental time in human history—its beginnings, its nearly chilling consequences, and its effects on global politics today.

Nuclear Weapons

Author: United States. General Accounting Office
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nuclear reactors
Languages : en
Pages : 44

Book Description

The Opportunity

Author: Steven Pifer
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815724292
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
For some observers, nuclear arms control is either a relic of the cold war, or a utopian dream about a denuclearized planet decades in the future. But, as Brookings scholars Steven Pifer and Michael O'Hanlon argue in The Opportunity, arms control can address some key security challenges facing Washington today and enhance both American and global security. Pifer and O'Hanlon make a compelling case for further arms control measures to reduce the nuclear threat to the United States and its allies, to strengthen strategic stability, to promote greater transparency regarding secretive nuclear arsenals, to create the possibility for significant defense budget savings, to bolster American credibility in the fight to curb nuclear proliferation, and to build a stronger and more sustainable U.S.-Russia relationship. President Obama gave priority to nuclear arms control early in his first term and, by all accounts, would like to be transformational on these questions. Can there be another major U.S.-Russia arms treaty? Can the tactical and surplus strategic nuclear warheads that have so far escaped controls be brought into such a framework? Can a modus vivendi be reached between the two countries on missile defense? And what of multilateral accords on nuclear testing and production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons? Pifer and O'Hanlon concisely frame the issues, the background, and the choices facing the president; provide practical policy recommendations, and put it all in clear and readable prose that will be easily understood by the layman.