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One more recommendation: The Swords of Armgeddon" by Chuck Hansen. Published as a CD ROM, it is full of historical references and photos: http://www.uscoldwa

One more recommendation: The Swords of Armgeddon" by Chuck Hansen. Published as a CD ROM, it is full of historical references and photos: http://www.uscoldwar.com/ http://www.uscoldwar.com/

philipkglass 5y ago
It is no longer sold, as far as I can tell. Hansen's widow was selling it after his death. You are supposed to send an email to order it (now as PDF downloads rather than optical disc). I emailed to order back in March of this year and never got a response. I more recently discovered that it has been uploaded to Library Genesis so I got it there. Swords of Armageddon is a history that quotes from primary sources very extensively. That's the bulk of the publication, by word count. It lends itself to more skimming than detailed reading in many sections due to this approach. These documents are more about policy, politics, and planning than about technical details. That may be due to Hansen's relative weakness on the technical side as well as due to source availability; I'm sure that documents about the diplomatic considerations following Operation Castle were more readily declassified than documents about the device data. Hansen's early introductory material contains some odd blunders about e.g. the physical properties of deuterium. Don't let that discourage you. Most of the book is so primary-source-driven that his powers of interpretation take a back seat. There are surely other histories of the post-war Atomic Energy Commission. This is the first book I have read that makes it clear what a leviathan it was. In 1956, the AEC alone accounted for 3.2% of the federal government's budget (not counting nuclear weapons costs allocated to other departments like Defense). This is comparable to NASA's share in the Apollo era of the following decade, but the AEC operated with much more secrecy. It spent billions of dollars on weapons improvements that were obsoleted in just a few more years by even greater improvements. It was the era of Moore's Law for mass destruction. One small interesting thing I learned: AEC had a multitude of reasons for experimenting with uranium 233 bred from thorium. Almost all of these reasons were related to nuclear weapons. U-233 was used in many nuclear weapons test series, though the details of usage (except for the one Operation Teapot test) have yet to be declassified.

One more recommendation: The Swords of Armgeddon" by Chuck Hansen. Published as a CD ROM, it is full of historical references and photos: http://www.uscoldwar.com/ http://www.uscoldwar.com/

philipkglass 5y ago

It is no longer sold, as far as I can tell. Hansen's widow was selling it after his death. You are supposed to send an email to order it (now as PDF downloads rather than optical disc). I emailed to order back in March of this year and never got a response. I more recently discovered that it has been uploaded to Library Genesis so I got it there. Swords of Armageddon is a history that quotes from primary sources very extensively. That's the bulk of the publication, by word count. It lends itself to more skimming than detailed reading in many sections due to this approach. These documents are more about policy, politics, and planning than about technical details. That may be due to Hansen's relative weakness on the technical side as well as due to source availability; I'm sure that documents about the diplomatic considerations following Operation Castle were more readily declassified than documents about the device data. Hansen's early introductory material contains some odd blunders about e.g. the physical properties of deuterium. Don't let that discourage you. Most of the book is so primary-source-driven that his powers of interpretation take a back seat. There are surely other histories of the post-war Atomic Energy Commission. This is the first book I have read that makes it clear what a leviathan it was. In 1956, the AEC alone accounted for 3.2% of the federal government's budget (not counting nuclear weapons costs allocated to other departments like Defense). This is comparable to NASA's share in the Apollo era of the following decade, but the AEC operated with much more secrecy. It spent billions of dollars on weapons improvements that were obsoleted in just a few more years by even greater improvements. It was the era of Moore's Law for mass destruction. One small interesting thing I learned: AEC had a multitude of reasons for experimenting with uranium 233 bred from thorium. Almost all of these reasons were related to nuclear weapons. U-233 was used in many nuclear weapons test series, though the details of usage (except for the one Operation Teapot test) have yet to be declassified.