Author: Spencer R. Weart Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674065069 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 381
Book Description
After a tsunami destroyed the cooling system at Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, triggering a meltdown, protesters around the world challenged the use of nuclear power. Germany announced it would close its plants by 2022. Although the ills of fossil fuels are better understood than ever, the threat of climate change has never aroused the same visceral dread or swift action. Spencer Weart dissects this paradox, demonstrating that a powerful web of images surrounding nuclear energy holds us captive, allowing fear, rather than facts, to drive our thinking and public policy.Building on his classic, Nuclear Fear, Weart follows nuclear imagery from its origins in the symbolism of medieval alchemy to its appearance in film and fiction. Long before nuclear fission was discovered, fantasies of the destroyed planet, the transforming ray, and the white city of the future took root in the popular imagination. At the turn of the twentieth century when limited facts about radioactivity became known, they produced a blurred picture upon which scientists and the public projected their hopes and fears. These fears were magnified during the Cold War, when mushroom clouds no longer needed to be imagined; they appeared on the evening news. Weart examines nuclear anxiety in sources as diverse as Alain Resnais's film Hiroshima Mon Amour, Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, and the television show The Simpsons.Recognizing how much we remain in thrall to these setpieces of the imagination, Weart hopes, will help us resist manipulation from both sides of the nuclear debate.
Author: Richard K. Betts Publisher: Brookings Institution Press ISBN: 0815717083 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
In numerous crises after World War II—Berlin, Korea, the Taiwan Straits, and the Middle East—the United States resorted to vague threats to use nuclear weapons in order to deter Soviet or Chinese military action. On a few occasions the Soviet Union also engaged in nuclear saber-ratling. Using declassified documents and other sources, this volume examines those crises and compares the decisionmaking processes of leaders who considered nuclear threats with the commonly accepted logic of nuclear deterrence and coercion. Rejecting standard explanations of our leader's logic in these cases, Betts suggests that U.S. presidents were neither consciously blufffing when they made nuclear threats, nor prepared to face the consequences if their threats failed. The author also challenges the myth that the 1950s was a golden age of low vulberability for the United Stateas and details how nuclear parity has, and has not, altered conditions that gave rise to nuclear blackmail in the past.
Author: Ward Wilson Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN: 054785787X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 205
Book Description
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.
Author: David E. Sanger Publisher: Crown ISBN: 0451497910 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 402
Book Description
NOW AN HBO® DOCUMENTARY FROM AWARD-WINNING DIRECTOR JOHN MAGGIO • “An important—and deeply sobering—new book about cyberwarfare” (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times), now updated with a new chapter. The Perfect Weapon is the startling inside story of how the rise of cyberweapons transformed geopolitics like nothing since the invention of the atomic bomb. Cheap to acquire, easy to deny, and usable for a variety of malicious purposes, cyber is now the weapon of choice for democracies, dictators, and terrorists. Two presidents—Bush and Obama—drew first blood with Operation Olympic Games, which used malicious code to blow up Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, and yet America proved remarkably unprepared when its own weapons were stolen from its arsenal and, during President Trump’s first year, turned back on the United States and its allies. And if Obama would begin his presidency by helping to launch the new era of cyberwar, he would end it struggling unsuccessfully to defend the 2016 U.S. election from interference by Russia, with Vladimir Putin drawing on the same playbook he used to destabilize Ukraine. Moving from the White House Situation Room to the dens of Chinese government hackers to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger reveals a world coming face-to-face with the perils of technological revolution, where everyone is a target. “Timely and bracing . . . With the deep knowledge and bright clarity that have long characterized his work, Sanger recounts the cunning and dangerous development of cyberspace into the global battlefield of the twenty-first century.”—Washington Post
Author: Henry Richard Maar III Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501760904 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 195
Book Description
In Freeze!, Henry Richard Maar III chronicles the rise of the transformative and transnational Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. Amid an escalating Cold War that pitted the nuclear arsenal of the United States against that of the Soviet Union, the grassroots peace movement emerged sweeping the nation and uniting people around the world. The solution for the arms race that the Campaign proposed: a bilateral freeze on the building, testing, and deployment of nuclear weapons on the part of two superpowers of the US and the USSR. That simple but powerful proposition stirred popular sentiment and provoked protest in the streets and on screen from New York City to London to Berlin. Movie stars and scholars, bishops and reverends, governors and congress members, and, ultimately, US President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev took a stand for or against the Freeze proposal. With the Reagan administration so openly discussing the prospect of winnable and survivable nuclear warfare like never before, the Freeze movement forcefully translated decades of private fears into public action. Drawing upon extensive archival research in recently declassified materials, Maar illuminates how the Freeze campaign demonstrated the power and importance of grassroots peace activism in all levels of society. The Freeze movement played an instrumental role in shaping public opinion and American politics, helping establish the conditions that would bring the Cold War to an end.
Author: Michael Krepon Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 1503629619 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 544
Book Description
The definitive guide to the history of nuclear arms control by a wise eavesdropper and masterful storyteller, Michael Krepon. The greatest unacknowledged diplomatic achievement of the Cold War was the absence of mushroom clouds. Deterrence alone was too dangerous to succeed; it needed arms control to prevent nuclear warfare. So, U.S. and Soviet leaders ventured into the unknown to devise guardrails for nuclear arms control and to treat the Bomb differently than other weapons. Against the odds, they succeeded. Nuclear weapons have not been used in warfare for three quarters of a century. This book is the first in-depth history of how the nuclear peace was won by complementing deterrence with reassurance, and then jeopardized by discarding arms control after the Cold War ended. Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace tells a remarkable story of high-wire acts of diplomacy, close calls, dogged persistence, and extraordinary success. Michael Krepon brings to life the pitched battles between arms controllers and advocates of nuclear deterrence, the ironic twists and unexpected outcomes from Truman to Trump. What began with a ban on atmospheric testing and a nonproliferation treaty reached its apogee with treaties that mandated deep cuts and corralled "loose nukes" after the Soviet Union imploded. After the Cold War ended, much of this diplomatic accomplishment was cast aside in favor of freedom of action. The nuclear peace is now imperiled by no less than four nuclear-armed rivalries. Arms control needs to be revived and reimagined for Russia and China to prevent nuclear warfare. New guardrails have to be erected. Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace is an engaging account of how the practice of arms control was built from scratch, how it was torn down, and how it can be rebuilt.
Author: Ira Katznelson Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0871404508 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 720
Book Description
An exploration of the New Deal era highlights the politicians and pundits of the time, many of whom advocated for questionable positions, including separation of the races and an American dictatorship.
Author: John Hersey Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0593082362 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 210
Book Description
Hiroshima is the story of six people—a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest—who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. In vivid and indelible prose, Pulitzer Prize–winner John Hersey traces the stories of these half-dozen individuals from 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city, through the hours and days that followed. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told, and his account of what he discovered is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.
Author: John Mueller Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199837090 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
John Mueller argues how our obsession with nuclear weapons is unsupported by history, scientific fact, or logic. Examining the entire atomic era, Mueller boldly contends that nuclear weapons have had little impact on history.
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Author: Spencer R. Weart
Author: Spencer R. WEART
Author: Richard K. Betts
Author: Ward Wilson
Author: David E. Sanger
Author: Henry Richard Maar III
Author: Michael Krepon
Author: Ira Katznelson
Author: John Hersey
Author: John Mueller