Nuclear Science

With danger dodging his heels at every turn, Private Investigator Zachary Nixon Johnson, while protecting Sexy Sprockets, a talentless redheaded teen media superstar, from terrorists, finds himself at the mercy of three psionic, superhuman dominatrices bent on world domination.

Robert Oppenheimer was among the most brilliant and divisive of men. As head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, he oversaw the successful effort to beat the Nazis in the race to develop the first atomic bomb – a breakthrough that was to have eternal ramifications for mankind and that made Oppenheimer the “Father of the Atomic Bomb.” But with his actions leading up to that great achievement, he also set himself on a dangerous collision course with Senator Joseph McCarthy and his witch-hunters. In Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center, Ray Monk, author of peerless biographies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, goes deeper than any previous biographer in the quest to solve the enigma of Oppenheimer’s motivations and his complex personality.

From the moment radiation was discovered in the late nineteenth century, nuclear science has had a rich history of innovative scientific exploration and discovery, coupled with mistakes, accidents, and downright disasters.

A fresh window on American history: the eye-opening truth about the government's secret plans to survive a catastrophic attack on US soil, even if the rest of us die - a road map that spans from the dawn of the nuclear age to today.

The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg's hair-raising insider's account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization, whose legacy - and renewal under the Obama administration - threatens the very survival of humanity. It is scarcely possible to estimate the true dangers of our present nuclear policies without penetrating the secret realities of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, when Ellsberg had high-level access to them.

In the late 1930s, legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the 20th century at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

Mars high Council member Merinda-1616 (all Mars colonists have numerical last names) has a very special job for the last freelance P.I. on Earth in the year 2057. Her dog has disappeared. It’s not the kind of work Zach and his sardonic holographic assistant Harv would normally take, but this is no ordinary canine.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of the iconic figures of the 20th century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb but later confronted the moral consequences of scientific progress. When he proposed international controls over atomic materials, opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, and criticized plans for a nuclear war, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup during the anti-Communist hysteria of the early 1950s.

In the first book of this survival thriller series, the pinnacle of human innovation turns into mankind’s greatest nightmare as Nuclear Armageddon was triggered.

Richard Rhodes' landmark history of the atomic bomb won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now, in this majestic new masterpiece of history, science, and politics, he tells for the first time the secret story of how and why the hydrogen bomb was made, and traces the path by which this supreme artifact of 20th-century technology became the defining issue of the Cold War.

Nuclear Winter enveloped the planet with its relentless barrage of dark, sooty air. With each passing day, more and more people died. In a desperate attempt to give people a chance to survive, some government leaders chose to marshal the assets of their community. It was a polite way of saying take from those who have and give to those who have not.

This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with many nuclear bombs detonated around the planet. It was no longer a topic of conversation around the dinner table as in years past. Nobody was prepared, including the world's governments. Yet the threat was always real, and the devastation was predictable. The damage was incalculable. Millions died at the points of impact. Nuclear winter spread across the globe. A rapidly cooling climate shocked humanity and all living things...to their death.

Atoms and Ashes recounts the dramatic history of nuclear accidents that have dogged the industry in its military and civil incarnations since the 1950s. Through the stories of six terrifying major incidents—Bikini Atoll, Kyshtym, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—Cold War expert Serhii Plokhy explores the risks of nuclear power, both for military and peaceful purposes, while offering a vivid account of how individuals and governments make decisions under extraordinary circumstances.

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake large enough to knock the earth from its axis sent a massive tsunami speeding toward the Japanese coast and the aging and vulnerable Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power reactors. Over the following weeks, the world watched in horror as a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe: fail-safes failed, cooling systems shut down, nuclear rods melted.

In an instant, Miami was devastated by a nuclear bomb. Millions fled the destruction as the lethal fallout descended. Now, the entire city is a hot zone. Hundreds of thousands of citizens are homeless, hungry, and growing more desperate with every passing hour. While the government scrambles to respond to the worst humanitarian crisis the US has ever seen, Dakota and Logan flee the hot zone. But the insidious radiation can't be escaped. It's already inside them.

This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with many nuclear bombs detonated around the planet. It was no longer a topic of conversation around the dinner table as in years past. Nobody was prepared, including the world's governments. Yet the threat was always real, and the devastation was predictable. The damage was incalcuable. Millions died at the points of impact. Nuclear Winter spread across the globe. A rapidly cooling climate shocked humanity and all living things...to their death.

Logan and Dakota must prepare for the fight of their lives in order to defeat an enemy more powerful than they've ever faced. The lives of everyone they love are on the line. The stakes couldn't be higher. Will they have what it takes? Or will the cost of victory be too terrible to bear?

From the acclaimed author of The Nobel Prize comes this fascinating portrait of four of the greatest minds in the history of science and the impossible turning point they faced. As World War II wound down, and it became increasingly clear that the Allies would emerge victorious, Albert Einstein invited three close friends - all titans of contemporary science and philosophy - to his home at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey, to discuss what they loved best: science and philosophy.

Why did the US intelligence services fail so spectacularly to know about the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities following World War II? As Vince Houghton, historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, shows us, that disastrous failure came just a few years after the Manhattan Project's intelligence team had penetrated the Third Reich and knew every detail of the Nazi's plan for an atomic bomb. What changed and what went wrong?

After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between 31 and 54 people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone.