The most recommended books on nuclear weapons

I really liked the unique way that author  George Feifer approached this final land battle of World War II. I was very interested in how he began the book by using individual American and Japanese recruits as the focal point, even detailing the training they went through.

Not only has he written a complete story of the battle, but he also has included a detailed account of the sinking of the mighty Japanese battleship–Yamato. I doubt if there is a better account of the sinking of Japan’s last hope for a naval victory in print.

Plus, Feifer includes in his work the tragedy of the native non-combatant Okinawans–over one hundred thousand of them perished in the battle. The author gives a wide overview of the entire contest, which is the best I’ve seen.  

I didn’t have the time or energy for this tome of a book on Harry Truman. Hence, I'd never have read it had it not been ‘assigned’ by the book club I was in.

But I was mesmerized from the first pages. And felt connected to this unobtrusive, somewhat unattractive man who was in every way ordinary. But who became the president during the last days of World War ll. A man who thought and spoke clearly. A man who seemed to personify the virtues without calling them that.

I learned a great deal from this book.

As the daughter of one of the last children to contract polio before the vaccines, I knew this was going to be an important book even before I opened it.

But it was also a page-turning chronicle of Dr. Dorothy Horstmann, a pioneer in the battle to eradicate polio. I was often infuriated by what she faced as a woman in science during the 1950s; it was a very good read that brought much-needed attention to this extraordinary woman’s gifts to medical science.

There are lots of books with protagonists who think they’re smart, but the heroine in The Woman with Two Shadows is actually smart. 

Not just academically (though she is that, too), and not just quick with the quips, but with the way she approaches her central problem: The disappearance of her twin sister in a town set up specifically to develop nuclear weapons during World War II.

The historical detail is unique, and the self-pity is dialed down to nearly a minimum, which makes it my kind of book!

This novel, inspired by the little-known story of Austrian-born scientist Lise Meitner, is part spy thriller, part love story, part history lesson. And it was so gripping and fast paced that I devoured it in one day.

The story is set in Los Alamo, New Mexico in the 1940s — where J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team of scientists were engaged in an all-stakes race against the Germans to procure the nuclear bomb.

Throughout the book, Eliasberg uses her character, Hannah, to set the record straight about the fact that it was a woman scientist and Austrian Jew who discovered nuclear fission before she was forced to flee Germany to avoid Hitler’s concentration camps. This cinematic story belongs on the big screen right beside the blockbuster Oppenheimer. 

In 1958 Edward Teller, the father of the H bomb, and the United States Government wanted to explode six mega-ton bombs, forty miles from an Inupiat village on the coast of the Bering Sea in arctic Alaska. Project Chariot was to be the first in a line of proposed projects using nuclear bombs for creating info structure. The explosions were intended to create a deep-water port. Read how a small Inupiat village, a handful of scientists, and a few conservationists took on the US government and won, in the process, birthed the modern conservation movement in the United States. Well written, informative, inspirational, and a joy to read.

Nuclear weapons are not just dangerous if they are used in a nuclear war. Their development, testing, production, deployment, and decommissioning are all harmful to the planet. My favourite thing about this book is how this fact is explored and examined at the global and local levels.

With a geographer’s attention to the specifics of space and place, Alexis-Martin takes us on a journey around the world and through history that illuminates how all parts of the nuclear weapon production cycle have harmed people whose stories we often don’t hear. From indigenous communities displaced by nuclear weapons production facilities to the British veterans who were used as lab rats and exposed to nuclear tests by the state, this book uncovers the often hidden history of nuclear weapons.

I really enjoyed this, especially as Alexis-Martin then reflects on how we can prevent nuclear war in the future.

This book doesn’t have a catchy title and sounds rather pedestrian, but we are told never to judge a book by its cover and in this case it’s true about the title as well! Mark Parillo’s magisterial thesis taught me a great deal about why the Japanese lost the Pacific War. He explains why they stubbornly refused to convoy their merchant fleet even when, by failing to do so, they were aiding the enemy’s cause. Japan needed to import most of its war material, but once the US submarine campaign began to decimate the ships that were bringing in those vital supplies in 1944-45 the game was essentially up. Therefore, a case can be made that the war was effectively lost before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

I struggled to balance recent books that explore nuclear politics with the benefit of decades of history and earlier foundational books. Picking only one from the latter category may be a mistake. Thomas Schelling’s Strategy of Conflict, Robert Jervis’s Theory of the Nuclear Revolution, and many others deserve mention. I included Absolute Weapon because it was the earliest attempt to explore what nuclear weapons meant for international politics. It is best remembered for Brodie’s contention that victory in nuclear war is meaningless, and so the central purpose of nuclear weapons is deterrence. Yet Brodie grapples—at times suggesting divergent answers—with many enduring questions: the requirements for deterrence, the prospects for meaningful superiority, and the potential for superiority (to say nothing of monopoly) to offer political advantages or spur aggression. 

From the birth of the Manhattan Project in 1942 until the first test of an H bomb in 1952, Edward Teller was central to the development of a thermonuclear weapon.

He is called the father of the H bomb with good reason. Yet, he is controversial. He made more enemies than friends. His own account of that period is fascinating. I worked with Teller and was a friend.