[PDF] Nuclear Roulette eBook

Author : Gar Smith
Publisher : Chelsea Green Publishing
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 42,11 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 160358434X

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Nuclear power is not clean, cheap, or safe. With Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, the nuclear industry's record of catastrophic failures now averages one major disaster every decade. After three US-designed plants exploded in Japan, many countries moved to abandon reactors for renewables. In the United States, however, powerful corporations and a compliant government still defend nuclear power-while promising billion-dollar bailouts to operators. Each new disaster demonstrates that the nuclear industry and governments lie to "avoid panic," to preserve the myth of "safe, clean" nuclear power, and to sustain government subsidies. Tokyo and Washington both covered up Fukushima's radiation risks and-when confronted with damning evidence-simply raised the levels of "acceptable" risk to match the greater levels of exposure. Nuclear Roulette dismantles the core arguments behind the nuclear-industrial complex's "Nuclear Renaissance." While some critiques are familiar-nuclear power is too costly, too dangerous, and too unstable-others are surprising: Nuclear Roulette exposes historic links to nuclear weapons, impacts on Indigenous lands and lives, and the ways in which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission too often takes its lead from industry, rewriting rules to keep failing plants in compliance. Nuclear Roulette cites NRC records showing how corporations routinely defer maintenance and lists resulting "near-misses" in the US, which average more than one per month. Nuclear Roulette chronicles the problems of aging reactors, uncovers the costly challenge of decommissioning, explores the industry's greatest seismic risks-not on California's quake-prone coast but in the Midwest and Southeast-and explains how solar flares could black out power grids, causing the world's 400-plus reactors to self-destruct. This powerful exposé concludes with a roundup of proven and potential energy solutions that can replace nuclear technology with a "Renewable Renaissance," combined with conservation programs that can cleanse the air, and cool the planet.

Author : Martin J. Sherwin
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 624 pages
File Size : 40,79 MB
Release : 2020-10-13
Category : History
ISBN : 0525659315

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus comes the first effort to set the Cuban Missile Crisis, with its potential for nuclear holocaust, in a wider historical narrative of the Cold War—how such a crisis arose, and why at the very last possible moment it didn't happen. In this groundbreaking look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Sherwin not only gives us a riveting sometimes hour-by-hour explanation of the crisis itself, but also explores the origins, scope, and consequences of the evolving place of nuclear weapons in the post-World War II world. Mining new sources and materials, and going far beyond the scope of earlier works on this critical face-off between the United States and the Soviet Union—triggered when Khrushchev began installing missiles in Cuba at Castro's behest—Sherwin shows how this volatile event was an integral part of the wider Cold War and was a consequence of nuclear arms. Gambling with Armageddon looks in particular at the original debate in the Truman Administration about using the Atomic Bomb; the way in which President Eisenhower relied on the threat of massive retaliation to project U.S. power in the early Cold War era; and how President Kennedy, though unprepared to deal with the Bay of Pigs debacle, came of age during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here too is a clarifying picture of what was going on in Khrushchev's Soviet Union. Martin Sherwin has spent his career in the study of nuclear weapons and how they have shaped our world. Gambling with Armegeddon is an outstanding capstone to his work thus far.

Author : Martin J. Sherwin
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 641 pages
File Size : 32,10 MB
Release : 2022-02-22
Category : History
ISBN : 0307386333

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus comes the first effort to set the Cuban Missile Crisis, with its potential for nuclear holocaust, in a wider historical narrative of the Cold War—how such a crisis arose and why, at the very last possible moment, it never happened. “Fresh and thrilling.... A fascinating work of history that is very relevant to today’s politics.” —Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of The Code Breaker Pulitzer Prize-winning author Martin J. Sherwin introduces a dramatic new view of how luck and leadership avoided a nuclear holocaust during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Set within the sweep of the Cold War and its nuclear history, every chapter of this gripping narrative of the origins and resolution of history’s most dangerous thirteen days offers lessons and a warning for our time. Gambling with Armageddon presents a riveting, page turning account of the crisis as well as an original exploration of the evolving place of nuclear weapons in the Post-World War II world.

Author : Alex Wellerstein
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 558 pages
File Size : 21,37 MB
Release : 2021-04-09
Category : History
ISBN : 022602038X

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"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"--

Author : Richard K. Betts
Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 26,31 MB
Release : 2010-12-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0815717083

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In numerous crises after World War II—Berlin, Korea, the Taiwan Straits, and the Middle East—the United States resorted to vague threats to use nuclear weapons in order to deter Soviet or Chinese military action. On a few occasions the Soviet Union also engaged in nuclear saber-ratling. Using declassified documents and other sources, this volume examines those crises and compares the decisionmaking processes of leaders who considered nuclear threats with the commonly accepted logic of nuclear deterrence and coercion. Rejecting standard explanations of our leader's logic in these cases, Betts suggests that U.S. presidents were neither consciously blufffing when they made nuclear threats, nor prepared to face the consequences if their threats failed. The author also challenges the myth that the 1950s was a golden age of low vulberability for the United Stateas and details how nuclear parity has, and has not, altered conditions that gave rise to nuclear blackmail in the past.

Author : Serhii Plokhy
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 148 pages
File Size : 38,46 MB
Release : 2024-09-03
Category : History
ISBN : 1324079428

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A harrowing account of Russia’s occupation of the Chernobyl and Zaporizhia nuclear power plants, and the dangers of nuclear power colliding with warfare. On February 24, 2022, the first day of Russia’s all-out attack on Ukraine, armored vehicles approached the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. Russian occupation of the plant, which would last thirty-five days, had begun. Only the dedication and resolve of Ukrainian personnel, who were held hostage and worked shifts for weeks instead of days, spared the world a new Chernobyl accident. They had to make life-or-death decisions on cooperation or resistance, balancing loyalty to their families, their homeland, and innocent civilians in Ukraine and beyond who would suffer the consequences of a nuclear accident should it occur. The choices they made helped to save the world from another Chernobyl disaster. Meanwhile, a much more dangerous situation developed at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, the largest such facility in Europe. Following an attack there in March 2022, the Russian military remains in control, and Ukrainian intelligence warns of the potential for nuclear terrorism. We must face up to a new reality: there has already been warfare at two nuclear sites, and others are vulnerable. In a book that reads like a thriller, Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of the Cold War and Ukrainian history, joins the stories of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to sound the alarm about the dangers of nuclear sites in a time of heightened conflict. There are 440 such sites around the globe today, and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine will not be the last war in human history. The story of the men and women of Chornobyl is more than recent history: it is also a glimpse into the not-so-distant future.