Confronting the Bomb

Confronting the Bomb PDF Author: Lawrence S. Wittner
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804771243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
Confronting the Bomb tells the dramatic, inspiring story of how citizen activism helped curb the nuclear arms race and prevent nuclear war. This abbreviated version of Lawrence Wittner's award-winning trilogy, The Struggle Against the Bomb, shows how a worldwide, grassroots campaign—the largest social movement of modern times—challenged the nuclear priorities of the great powers and, ultimately, thwarted their nuclear ambitions. Based on massive research in the files of peace and disarmament organizations and in formerly top secret government records, extensive interviews with antinuclear activists and government officials, and memoirs and other published materials, Confronting the Bomb opens a unique window on one of the most important issues of the modern era: survival in the nuclear age. It covers the entire period of significant opposition to the bomb, from the final stages of the Second World War up to the present. Along the way, it provides fascinating glimpses of the interaction of key nuclear disarmament activists and policymakers, including Albert Einstein, Harry Truman, Albert Schweitzer, Norman Cousins, Nikita Khrushchev, Bertrand Russell, Andrei Sakharov, Linus Pauling, Dwight Eisenhower, Harold Macmillan, John F. Kennedy, Randy Forsberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Helen Caldicott, E.P. Thompson, and Ronald Reagan. Overall, however, it is a story of popular mobilization and its effectiveness.

Confronting the Bomb

Confronting the Bomb PDF Author: Lawrence S. Wittner
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804771243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
Confronting the Bomb tells the dramatic, inspiring story of how citizen activism helped curb the nuclear arms race and prevent nuclear war. This abbreviated version of Lawrence Wittner's award-winning trilogy, The Struggle Against the Bomb, shows how a worldwide, grassroots campaign—the largest social movement of modern times—challenged the nuclear priorities of the great powers and, ultimately, thwarted their nuclear ambitions. Based on massive research in the files of peace and disarmament organizations and in formerly top secret government records, extensive interviews with antinuclear activists and government officials, and memoirs and other published materials, Confronting the Bomb opens a unique window on one of the most important issues of the modern era: survival in the nuclear age. It covers the entire period of significant opposition to the bomb, from the final stages of the Second World War up to the present. Along the way, it provides fascinating glimpses of the interaction of key nuclear disarmament activists and policymakers, including Albert Einstein, Harry Truman, Albert Schweitzer, Norman Cousins, Nikita Khrushchev, Bertrand Russell, Andrei Sakharov, Linus Pauling, Dwight Eisenhower, Harold Macmillan, John F. Kennedy, Randy Forsberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Helen Caldicott, E.P. Thompson, and Ronald Reagan. Overall, however, it is a story of popular mobilization and its effectiveness.

Confronting the Nuclear Age

Confronting the Nuclear Age PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nuclear disarmament
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Get Book Here

Book Description


Restricted Data

Restricted Data PDF Author: Alex Wellerstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022602038X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 558

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Nuclear weapons, since their conception, have been the subject of secrecy. In the months after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American scientific establishment, the American government, and the American public all wrestled with what was called the "problem of secrecy," wondering not only whether secrecy was appropriate and effective as a means of controlling this new technology but also whether it was compatible with the country's core values. Out of a messy context of propaganda, confusion, spy scares, and the grave counsel of competing groups of scientists, what historian Alex Wellerstein calls a "new regime of secrecy" was put into place. It was unlike any other previous or since. Nuclear secrets were given their own unique legal designation in American law ("restricted data"), one that operates differently than all other forms of national security classification and exists to this day. Drawing on massive amounts of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time at the author's request, Restricted Data is a narrative account of nuclear secrecy and the tensions and uncertainty that built as the Cold War continued. In the US, both science and democracy are pitted against nuclear secrecy, and this makes its history uniquely compelling and timely"--

Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb

Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb PDF Author: John Gaddis
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191522333
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945 is a path-breaking work that uses biographical techniques to test one of the most important and widely debated questions in international politics: Did the advent of the nuclear bomb prevent the Third World War? Many scholars and much conventional wisdom assumes that nuclear deterrence has prevented major power war since the end of the Second World War; this remains a principal tenet of US strategic policy today. Others challenge this assumption, and argue that major war would have been `obsolete' even without the bomb. This book tests these propositions by examining the careers of ten leading Cold War statesmen—Harry S Truman; John Foster Dulles; Dwight D. Eisenhower; John F. Kennedy; Josef Stalin; Nikita Krushchev; Mao Zedong; Winston Churchill; Charles De Gaulle; and Konrad Adenauer—and asking whether they viewed war, and its acceptability, differently after the advent of the bomb. The book's authors argue almost unanimously that nuclear weapons did have a significant effect on the thinking of these leading statesmen of the nuclear age, but a dissenting epilogue from John Mueller challenges this thesis.

My Journey at the Nuclear Brink

My Journey at the Nuclear Brink PDF Author: William Perry
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804797145
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Perry has long been one of the more strenuous advocates for confronting the dangers of the nuclear age, and his engaging memoir explains why.” —Foreign Affairs My Journey at the Nuclear Brink is a continuation of former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry's efforts to keep the world safe from a nuclear catastrophe. It tells the story of his coming of age in the nuclear era, his role in trying to shape and contain it, and how his thinking has changed about the threat these weapons pose. In a remarkable career, Perry has dealt firsthand with the changing nuclear threat. Decades of experience and special access to top-secret knowledge of strategic nuclear options have given Perry a unique, and chilling, vantage point from which to conclude that nuclear weapons endanger our security rather than securing it. This book traces his thought process as he journeys from the Cuban Missile Crisis, to crafting a defense strategy in the Carter Administration to offset the Soviets’ numeric superiority in conventional forces, to presiding over the dismantling of more than 8,000 nuclear weapons in the Clinton Administration, and to his creation in 2007, with George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and Henry Kissinger, of the Nuclear Security Project to articulate their vision of a world free from nuclear weapons and to lay out the urgent steps needed to reduce nuclear dangers. “Perry’s authoritative memoir. . . . is a clear, sobering and, for many, surprising warning that the danger of a nuclear catastrophe today is actually greater than it was during that era of U.S.-Soviet competition…a significant and insightful memoir and a necessary read.” —Mortimer B. Zuckerman, U.S. News & World Report

Waking Up in the Nuclear Age

Waking Up in the Nuclear Age PDF Author: Chellis Glendinning
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description


Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam

Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam PDF Author: Gar Alperovitz
Publisher: New York : Simon and Schuster
ISBN:
Category : Soviet Union
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
Assessment of the influence of the atomic factor on U.S.-Russian relations since the Hiroshima bombing under the Truman administration.

The Writing on the Cloud

The Writing on the Cloud PDF Author: Alison M. Scott
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is a path-breaking collection of essays which explore the diverse and complex ways American culture has been shaped by the looming presence of the atomic bomb, the central icon of technology, diplomacy, and war, of the second half of the twentieth century. These essays were originally presented as papers at a 1995 conference at Bowling Green State University commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Bomb; this collection is unusual in the range of subjects addressed, which range from abstract expressionism and modernist poetry to television sitcoms and advertisements for lipstick and appliances. The papers fall into four general areas of investigation and interpretation: the analysis of widespread cultural issues or social movements; the examination of particular cultural artifacts; the explorations of aspects of political, diplomatic, or military history; and recollections or interpretations of personal experience. Contents: The Consequences of the Atomic Bomb: The End of the Soviet Union and the Beginning of Environmental Hysteria, Edward Teller; Bert the Turtle Meets Doctor Spock: Parenting in Atomic Age America, Daniel Gomes; Commercial Fallout: The Image of Progress and the Feminine Consumer in the Atomic Age (1945-1962), John Gregory Stocke; From the Missile Gap to the Culture Gap: Modernism in the Fallout from Sputnik, David Howard; Detonating on Canvas: The Abstract Bomb in American Art, Richard Martin; SANE and Beyond Sane: Poets and the H-Bomb, 1958-1960, Daniel Belgrad; From Science to Science Fiction: Leo Szilard and Fictional Persuasion, Michael L. Lewis; Sh-Boom or, How Early Rock & Roll Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Richard Aquila; "Are You Ready for the Great Atomic Power?" Music and Protest, 1945-1960, Joseph C. Ruff; Stories Told by Godzilla and Rodan, Helen Schwartz; The Berlin Crisis, the Bomb Shelter Craze and Bizarre Television: Expressions of an Atomic Age Counterculture in the Early 1960s, Margot A. Henricksen; Peace on Earth Without Goodwill T

Nuclear Statecraft

Nuclear Statecraft PDF Author: Francis J. Gavin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801465761
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
We are at a critical juncture in world politics. Nuclear strategy and policy have risen to the top of the global policy agenda, and issues ranging from a nuclear Iran to the global zero movement are generating sharp debate. The historical origins of our contemporary nuclear world are deeply consequential for contemporary policy, but it is crucial that decisions are made on the basis of fact rather than myth and misapprehension. In Nuclear Statecraft, Francis J. Gavin challenges key elements of the widely accepted narrative about the history of the atomic age and the consequences of the nuclear revolution. On the basis of recently declassified documents, Gavin reassesses the strategy of flexible response, the influence of nuclear weapons during the Berlin Crisis, the origins of and motivations for U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy, and how to assess the nuclear dangers we face today. In case after case, he finds that we know far less than we think we do about our nuclear history. Archival evidence makes it clear that decision makers were more concerned about underlying geopolitical questions than about the strategic dynamic between two nuclear superpowers. Gavin's rigorous historical work not only tells us what happened in the past but also offers a powerful tool to explain how nuclear weapons influence international relations. Nuclear Statecraft provides a solid foundation for future policymaking.

The Nuclear Age

The Nuclear Age PDF Author: Tim O'Brien
Publisher: Laurel
ISBN: 9780440215868
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Nuclear Ageis about one man's slightly insane attempt to come to terms with a dilemma that confronts us all -- a little thing called The Bomb. The year is 1995, and William Cowling has finally found the courage to meet his fears head-on. Cowling's courage takes the form of a hole that he begins digging in his backyard in an effort to "bury" all thoughts of the apocalypse. Cowling's wife, however, is ready to leave him; his daughter has taken to calling him "nutto"; and Cowling's own checkered past seems to be rising out of the crater taking shape on his lawn, besieging him with flashbacks and memories of a life that's had more than its share of turmoil. Brilliantly interweaving his masterful storytelling powers with dark, surreal humor and empathy for characters caught in circumstances beyond their control, Tim O'Brien brings us his most entertaining novel to date. At once wildly comic and sneakily profound,The Nuclear Ageis also utterly unforgettable.