Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Atomic Obsession PDF full book. Access full book title Atomic Obsession by John Mueller. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
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.
Author: John Mueller Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199745811 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
Following 9/11, Americans were swept up in a near hysteria-level fear of terrorists, especially of Islamic extremists working domestically. The government and media reports stoked fears that people living in the US have the desire and means to wreak extreme havoc and destruction. Early reports estimated slightly more than 300 al Qaeda operatives living in the United States. It wasn't long before this number became 2,000 or 5,000 domestic terrorists. As these estimates snowballed, so did spending on federal counterterrorism organizations and measures, spending which now totals over a trillion dollars. The federal government launched more covert operations in the name of fighting terrorist adversaries than they did in the entirety of the forty-five year Cold War. For each apprehension of a credible terrorist suspect, the US government created or re-organized two counterterrorism organizations. The scale of these efforts has been enormous, yet somehow they have not been proven to make Americans feels safe from what they perceive to be a massive terrorist threat. But how well-founded is this fear? Is the threat of terrorism in the United States as vast as it seems and are counterterrorism efforts effective and appropriately-scaled? It has not, statistically speaking, been efficient or successful. Only one alarm in 10,000 has proven to be a legitimate threat-the rest are what the authors refer to as "ghosts." These ghosts are enormous drains on resources and contribute to a countrywide paranoia that has resulted in widespread support and minimal critical questioning of massive expenditures and infringements on civil liberties, including invasions of privacy and questionably legal imprisonments. In Chasing Ghosts, John Mueller and Mark Stewart argue that the "ghost chase" occupying American fears, law enforcement, and federal spending persists because the public believes that there exists in the US a dire and significant threat of terrorism. The authors seek to analyze to what degree this is a true and to what degree the threat posed by terrorists in the US defends the extraordinary costs currently put towards their investigation. The chance that an American will be killed by a terrorist domestically in any given year is about one in four million (under present conditions). Yet despite this statistically low risk and the extraordinary amount of resources put towards combatting threats, Americans do not profess to feel any safer from terrorists. Until the true threat of domestic terrorism is analyzed and understood, the country cannot begin to confront whether our pursuit of ghosts is worth the cost.
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.
Author: John E. Mueller Publisher: ISBN: 9780197732892 Category : Hiroshima-shi (Japan) Languages : en Pages : 0
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.
Author: Jessica Wang Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807867101 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 396
Book Description
No professional group in the United States benefited more from World War II than the scientific community. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists enjoyed unprecedented public visibility and political influence as a new elite whose expertise now seemed critical to America's future. But as the United States grew committed to Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union and the ideology of anticommunism came to dominate American politics, scientists faced an increasingly vigorous regimen of security and loyalty clearances as well as the threat of intrusive investigations by the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities and other government bodies. This book is the first major study of American scientists' encounters with Cold War anticommunism in the decade after World War II. By examining cases of individual scientists subjected to loyalty and security investigations, the organizational response of the scientific community to political attacks, and the relationships between Cold War ideology and postwar science policy, Jessica Wang demonstrates the stifling effects of anticommunist ideology on the politics of science. She exposes the deep divisions over the Cold War within the scientific community and provides a complex story of hard choices, a community in crisis, and roads not taken.
Author: Melvin R. Adams Publisher: ISBN: 9780874223415 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Perhaps the first environmental engineer at Hanford, Melvin R. Adams spent 24 years on its 586 square miles of desert terrain. His thoughtful vignettes recall challenges and sites he worked on or found personally intriguing--like the 216-U-pond, contaminated with plutonium longer than any place on earth. In what Adams considers his most successful project, he helped determine the initial scope of the soil and solid waste cleanup. His group also designed and tested a marked, maintenance-free disposal barrier, expanded a network of groundwater monitoring wells, and developed a pilot scale pump and treatment plant. Adams shares his perspective on leaking high-level waste storage tanks, dosimeters, and Hanford¿s obsession with safety. He even answers his least favorite question, insisting he does not glow in the dark. He leaves that unique ability to spent fuel rods in water storage basins--a phenomenon known as Cherenkov radiation.
Author: Jennet Conant Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1416585427 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 448
Book Description
From the bestselling author of Tuxedo Park, the extraordinary story of the thousands of people who were sequestered in a military facility in the desert for twenty-seven intense months under J. Robert Oppenheimer where the world's best scientists raced to invent the atomic bomb and win World War II. In 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, charismatic head of the Manhattan Project, recruited scientists to live as virtual prisoners of the U.S. government at Los Alamos, a barren mesa thirty-five miles outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thousands of men, women, and children spent the war years sequestered in this top-secret military facility. They lied to friends and family about where they were going and what they were doing, and then disappeared into the desert. Through the eyes of a young Santa Fe widow who was one of Oppenheimer's first recruits, we see how, for all his flaws, he developed into an inspiring leader and motivated all those involved in the Los Alamos project to make a supreme effort and achieve the unthinkable.
Author: Richard Rhodes Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0307387410 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 482
Book Description
The final volume in Richard Rhodes's prizewinning history of nuclear weapons offers the first comprehensive narrative of the challenges faced in the post-Cold War age. The past twenty years have transformed our relationship with nuclear weapons drastically. With extraordinary depth of knowledge and understanding, Richard Rhodes makes clear how the five original nuclear powers--Russia, Great Britain, France, China, and especially the United States--have struggled with new realities. He reveals the real reasons George W. Bush chose to fight a second war in Iraq, assesses the emerging threat of nuclear terrorism, and offers advice on how our complicated relationships with North Korea and South Asia should evolve. Finally, he imagines what a post-nuclear world might look like, as only he can.
Author: Jonathan Schell Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 0805081291 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
Explores the growing danger of nuclear conflict since the end of the Cold War, citing issues such as the invasion of Iraq, nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea, and the rise of terrorism.
Author: Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 1496831136 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
Contributions by Thomas J. Cobb, Donna A. Gessell, Helena Goscilo, Cyndy Hendershot, Christian Jimenez, David LaRocca, Lori Maguire, Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad, Ian Scott, Vesta Silva, Lucian Tion, Dan Ward, and Jon Wiebel In recent years, Hollywood cinema has forwarded a growing number of images of the Cold War and entertained a return to memories of conflicts between the USSR and the US, Russians and Americans, and communism and capitalism. Cold War II: Hollywood’s Renewed Obsession with Russia explores the reasons for this sudden reestablished interest in the Cold War. Essayists examine such films as Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s Hail, Caesar!, David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, and Francis Lawrence’s Red Sparrow, among others, as well as such television shows as Comrade Detective and The Americans. Contributors to this collection interrogate the revival of the Cold War movie genre from multiple angles and examine the issues of patriotism, national identity, otherness, gender, and corruption. They consider cinematic aesthetics and the ethics of these representations. They reveal how Cold War imagery shapes audiences’ understanding of the period in general and of the relationship between the US and Russia in particular. The authors complicate traditional definitions of the Cold War film and invite readers to discover a new phase in the Cold War movie genre: Cold War II.