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There was infighting between proponents of nuclear safety and proponents of nuclear readiness in SAC and Los Alamos. Some people wanted to have multiple independent safety devices to prevent accidental nuclear detonations or launches, others wanted nothing but a big red button to launch the missiles.
Command and Control by Eric Schlosser does a very good job of telling this story, as well as the story of a nuclear accident in Damascus Arkansas.
Not exactly
The German scientists who were working on the Nazi nuclear program were taken prisoner by the British and kept incarcerated in Britain. Their rooms were bugged, and they were secretly recorded discussing in disbelief the news of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. They knew the science and theory, but many of them didn't believe it was possible.
You are correct they didn't have sufficient uranium. Indeed, thanks to the Allied special forces and air-raids, and Norwegian resistance fighters, the only access to heavy water was destroyed and the largest shipment of heavy water itself was sunk (ironically).
I highly recommend Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It won a Pulitzer Prize in its own right. An utterly fascinating book and extremely well written.
The book Command and Control gives a good accounting of that story, along with a really interesting look into the history of nuclear weapons. I'd highly recommend the book if you're interested in nuclear stuff.
Strictly speaking, per the 25th Amendment, she would not be the acting President but the real-actual-in-fact President.
Once strategic nuclear forces were a thing, this became a serious question that needed solving. I strongly recommend Raven Rock, which is a really cool treatment of Continuity of Government efforts during the Cold War for more on this.
I'm currently reading Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, by Eric Schlosser, and I have NO idea how humanity made it out of the 1970s alive. Hoooly shit, what you think you know is just the tip of the terrifying ice berg.
If you are interested in stuff like this you should check out the book Command And Control.
It really highlights how close to utter devastation we have been during the past 60 years...
One of the top reviews from Amazon: As a former Titan II Missile Facilities Technician, this was a page-turner for me. The author got it right in his descriptions of the attitudes and culture in the missile career field, the systems in use, even the music we listened to back then. It is rare for a military themed book written by a non-military writer to be so spot-on (IMO). The descriptions of some of the close calls we (we citizens) had with H-bombs are chilling, and the story about the Damascus Arkansas Titan II explosion was weaved in perfectly throughout the book. Time well spent.
It's becoming obvious that all your social media is being manipulated. Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/etc. Professors have shown that the entire narrative of a subreddit/post can be controlled by as few as 5 bot accounts. $200 is enough to get a clearly false post onto the front page.
The key is that you should put NO faith in arguments nor articles written on social media/twitter/etc. Consider it all fun theater, but don't use it to form your opinions or be educated on a subject.
But this is not new. All during the Cold War, Russia would manipulate groups to stall and derail US politics. Despite the fact the whole effort was very poorly handled and turned into a witch hunt, the Red Scare searches for Russian manipulation was quite real.
If you think you're immune, know that the military's handling of nuclear weapons is often seen as incompetent and comical. See Dr. Strangeglove. Despite the fact Russia had even MORE incidents and worse handling, they did a tremendously good job of capitalizing on our failures. When their intelligence found an incident of mishandling, they would leak it to the news, and then use our own news/advocacy groups work against the government. They absolutely did fund/feed/use well-meaning groups that aligned with their goals: create scandal, discredit politicians, control narratives, ferment social disorder. Sound familiar?
Worth a read about cold war nuclear programs and had a good chapter on these tactics:
Command and Control - Eric Schlosser
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C5R7F8G/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Just went over this with out group.
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Nuclear War Survival Skills book. Look up the author. He has seen and done some shit. If I remember he was also there for some testing of nukes. Was working with congress on civil defense before M.A.D. and eventually started petitioning them to start civil defense up again after the US stopped it. This book has a lot of what civilians can do in case of an attack. There are some parts of the book that describe what you can do in 30 minutes (basically what you can do before the fallout starts landing outside blast radius) to survive. Amazing book.
If you want to read more with some amazing technical details of the Titan silos, I highly recommend Eric Schlosser's book "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety". It's a compelling read.
Man, let me tell you, if you ever have a chance to read Command and Control, it will chill you. And then you'll wonder with all of these "accidents" with nuclear weapons -- at least the ones the author found out about and reported -- why our luck hasn't ever run out. It'll make the most hardcore atheist believe in a benevolent deity looking over us.
If there's an EMP, you can count on two things: you won't be reading any of the books you've saved on your electronic devices, and you'll be trying to survive in a post-nuclear nightmare. For this reason get a hard copy of Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson H. Kearny. It is the single best book written on the subject for the average citizen.
In addition I would get a hard copy of the LDS Preparedness Manual. You can skip past the first couple of dozen pages if you aren't interested in the religious stuff. After that is an encyclopedic resource for survival.
You can get both books on Amazon right now for about $40 total, and if you do it will vastly improve your survival library.
So, there are some contingency plans even for this because the United States military is paranoid AF.
Short version, the various cabinet secretaries have entire chains of deputies below them which include career civil servants (ie, not elected officials). So, in the event that a nuclear strike wipes out DC at the moment of Presidential transition there exists a path wherein the US Attorney for the Central District of California inherits nuclear command authority.
In moments of national crisis -- 9/11 is a good example -- these people find themselves suddenly being treated like a national security asset just in case.
Check out Raven Rock by Garrett M Graff for a pretty accessible treatment of US Cold War era Continuity of Government plans.
The US has made many preparations to survive a nuclear war as well, so many in fact that by some definitions we could survive it. But, it's still destructive enough that MAD applies since we would all be hurt equally.
https://www.amazon.com/Raven-Rock-Governments-Secret-Itself-While/dp/1476735409
There's an interesting book on the subject.
This first time I had the opportunity to see one was at an air show at Edwards AFB back in the late 80s. Parked on the tarmac and we couldn't get closer than about 25ft. I was probably about 11yo and totally amazed to actually see one, and it was so close.
When I lived in DC, I got to see the one at the Air and Space extension out at Dulles (separate facility, but they share the same runways). You can get closer there, and I was still just as impressed decades later.
That is one awesome price of aviation history.
Also, the Area 51 book by Annie Jacobson has a lot to say about the development of this marvel. A great read.
There is an entire book written called Command and Control about the close calls that digs into more depth than Wikipedia does. I have read it and damn it is scary. Superb research by the author with very extensive bibliography. Highly recommended. Amazon link - https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illusion-ebook/dp/B00C5R7F8G/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1530577330&sr=1-2&keywords=nuclear+accidents
This, really, is what you want. Hiroshima by John Hersey. Yes, you can read it online for free; I recommend you buy it from Amazon for 8 dollars, because then you'll also get the fascinating Afterward.
This is a real classic of American journalism. You follow the lives of six people who were all living in Hiroshima at the time: what their lives were like just before the bombing; what they were like for the next few minutes, for that morning, that day, and the days afterwards. The hard copy comes with an Afterward: Hersey went back to Japan 40 years later to follow up on all six survivors.
Strongly recommended.
Ok first I will explain why the war was just, then why it was necessary.
The war in Iraq was just because Saddam Hussein's government had basically forfeited Iraqi sovereignty by:
- Genociding his own people
- Repeatedly invading other countries to conquest them
- Attacking coalition airplanes which violated the ceasefire from the Gulf War of 1991
- Developing and using WMDs:
- Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons (which are WMDs) to genocide his own people and others in the 80s
- Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons at the time of the 2003 invasion. I admit the intelligence the US presented to the UN was fabricated, but after the war an Iraq Nuclear scientist wrote a book called The Bomb in my Garden in which he explained how Hussein told him to hide atomic equipment from international inspectors.
I am also going to admit that the war in Iraq was poorly managed, but the alternative was to let Hussein stay in power. Imagine having Hussein in power during the war on terror, and during the Arab Spring, possibly with a completed nuclear weapons project. Specifically imagine the war in Syria going on next door.
Do you have a source for this? I'm not challenging you or anything, it sounds fascinating and I'd like to jump down that rabbit hole.
I loved the book Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety
If you want a book that is a little more personal (focusing on the people and their advancements), I would recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. I have not read the whole book yet, as it is 900 pages, but it is really good at the beginning.
The book was fantastic
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion
Way better than any UFO documentary that I have ever seen: Area51
I cannot recommend this book enough. written by a serious well-respected journalist with actual sources who were directly involved, instead of a bunch of unsubstantiated claims. Guarentee you will not be bored reading this.
This is exaggerated. He was a skeptic in very early days, but so were a lot of physicists. Rutherford was very doubtful of it working, he did more push back than Einstein by far. By 1939, when Szilárd explained the idea to use graphite to make it work, Einstein understood it right away. He agreed to help right away.
This book gives a lot of details about it, and I thought it was a great book. https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/1451677618
This book goes into pretty good detail about the Damascus Incident. This book will not give you warm fuzzies...
https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illusion/dp/0143125788
If anyone is interested in just now many near disasters were averted under the early ICBM days, this book is a must read. It's either the work of God or the best 40 years stroke of luck humanity has ever seen.
This is a great book which tells the story of this incident in detail, woven into a broader discussion of the history of nuclear accidents and near misses
https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illusion/dp/0143125788
A nuclear exchange isn't going to be as bad as you're thinking.
If Russia dropped all of its 6000 bombs on the US all at once, they'd probably kill a third of the population, maybe half, pretty much the big cities. There's still going to be a lot of people around rebuilding.
"Mutually assured destruction" was a US doctrine that the rest of the world, rightly, didn't subscribe to. "Nuclear Winter" was mostly soviet propaganda disproved in the early 1980s.
I'd highly recommend reading https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1634502973/; it's not the normal prepper fiction, it was actually written by a guy working for the US government on what it would take to keep the civilian population alive during a nuclear war. A lot of that book (like the food storage information and improvised cooking methods) has value for other disasters too.
For much more backstory on this, one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read is "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. For once the blurb on Amazon is entirely accurate, so I'll copy/paste it here:
The definitive history of nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project. From the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan, Richard Rhodes’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book details the science, the people, and the sociopolitical realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb.
This sweeping account begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of nuclear fission, and continues to World War Two and the Americans’ race to beat Hitler’s Nazis. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the nearly overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful dropping of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Reading like a character-driven suspense novel, the book introduces the players in this saga of physics, politics, and human psychology—from FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who pioneered quantum theory and the application of thermonuclear fission, including Planck, Szilard, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Meitner, von Neumann, and Lawrence.
From nuclear power’s earliest foreshadowing in the work of H.G. Wells to the bright glare of Trinity at Alamogordo and the arms race of the Cold War, this dread invention forever changed the course of human history, and The Making of The Atomic Bomb provides a panoramic backdrop for that story.
Richard Rhodes’s ability to craft compelling biographical portraits is matched only by his rigorous scholarship. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail that any reader can follow, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a thought-provoking and masterful work.
https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/1451677618
Nuclear War Survival Skills:... https://www.amazon.com/dp/1634502973?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
There's a pdf of the earlier edition (public domain) available if you do some searching.
Really good book.
Know where it's in stock? I was hoping to get a second copy shipped to some family members on the other side of the country.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1634502973/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_i_5A8EGFS3ZC0NF1BHHCTH
I just printed this one.
There is a 2016 version, but probably not surprisingly, it is temporarily out of stock to purchase.
Anyone know if the 2016 version can be found for free like this one?