The Nuclear Age - Ferrand Library

Atomic Awakening

A hundred years of nuclear history told as one argument: that the atom went from fantasy to solved puzzle in five wartime years, and has spent sixty years since as a paradox — the safest industrial process on Earth, and the one nobody will build. Mahaffey is a reactor engineer, and he was in the…

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

Richard Rhodes’s third volume on the nuclear age asks a question the first two did not: not how the weapons were made, but why there came to be seventy thousand of them, and how the making finally stopped. He begins at Chernobyl, because the reactor that exploded was a military design, because the cover-up was…

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

The book that won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has not been superseded in forty years. Richard Rhodes begins with a Hungarian physicist crossing a London street in 1933 and ends with a Japanese doctor’s nightmare, and in between builds three books into one: how physics…

Voices from Chernobyl

Three years of interviews in Belarus, arranged so that the people the accident happened to speak and the author does not. A fireman’s widow watching her husband’s skin come away in layers; an old woman who came back through the forest to a village that was buried; hunters ordered to shoot the pets of the…

Idaho Falls: The Untold Story of America’s First Nuclear Accident

In January 1961, a small Army reactor in the Idaho desert exploded and killed the three young men working on top of it — the first and only fatal reactor accident in American history. Investigators reconstructed the blast down to the millisecond, then wrote that the reason one crewman pulled a control rod too far…

Chernobyl 01:23:40

At 01:23:40 on 26 April 1986, an engineer at Chernobyl pressed the emergency shutdown button, and eighteen seconds later Reactor No. 4 destroyed itself. Andrew Leatherbarrow spent four and a half years of spare time working out exactly how — and why a machine with no pressure vessel, no containment building, and control rods that…

Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking

A Swiss family sat at the centre of the world’s biggest nuclear black market — and worked for the CIA the whole time. Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz tell how American and British intelligence penetrated A. Q. Khan’s proliferation network, sabotaged the centrifuges it was building for Libya and Iran, and intercepted a freighter in…

Atom: Journey Across the Subatomic Cosmos

Asimov’s last big science book takes one question — how far can you divide matter? — and follows it from a Greek philosopher’s heap of pebbles to the quarks and the big bang, in strict order, never giving an answer before the problem that demanded it. Twelve chapters, each named for what physics found when…

Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster

Two Union of Concerned Scientists experts and a Pulitzer-winning journalist give a full account of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster — then ask the question the industry did not want asked. Built on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s own crisis-room transcripts, it reads like a thriller and argues like an indictment. The result is two…

Atomic Accidents

A hunting dog, a radon-filled Ozark cave, and 130 years of everything that can go wrong with the atom. Mahaffey — a reactor engineer writing about his own field — arranges the accidents not by date but by kind: dropped bricks, burning graphite, liquid sodium, bombs falling out of airplanes, and finally Three Mile Island,…