U.S. Nuclear Weapons

What Hacker News says

1. philipkglassDec 2021
   I read the big Richard Rhodes classics [1] a long time ago. Now I'm mostly reading blogs, declassified primary sources, and publications from open source intelligence. Two somewhat lesser known books I recommend if you are looking for details more than broad history are U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History and The Swords of Armageddon, both by Chuck Hansen. Both are currently out of print. The latter can be found on Library Genesis. I scanned The Secret History about 10 years ago and uploaded it to a technical book sharing forum but sadly nobody seems to have propagated my scan to Library Genesis and I can't be bothered to go through their sign-up process right now.

   [1] The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.

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2. philipkglassOct 2021
   The Swords of Armageddon was only ever available digitally (first on CD-ROM, then as download). Hansen's widow used to sell it after his death but she is no longer responding to sales requests. Or at least mine was ignored early this year. You can find it on Library Genesis.

   U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History is sadly missing from LibGen, but it appears to be available as a digital checkout from the Internet Archive. It's a good companion book to Swords because it went through a professional editing-publishing cycle. Swords is a lot longer and rawer, with a higher ratio of text to illustrations.

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3. tropMar 2021
   Two more, by authors coincidentally with the same initials:

   Thinking in an Emergency (2012) by Elaine Scarry -- She argues for the importance of planning and procedure. Examples include the Swiss shelter system (civil defense), CPR training, and compacts in rural Canada to deal with grain silo fires. She suggests that careful thought before the emergency is vital for "civilization", or at lest for democratic governance. As a converse, the country is destabilized when an opportunist leader comes along, cowboy-style, and says, "This is a crisis, and I'm going to shoot from the hip and fix it". Hence it's both a pragmatic study and a lucid work of political philosophy.

   Command and Control (2014) by Eric Schlosser -- This is more of an anti-study: not what to do in an emergency, but the inevitable flaws in complex systems, the limited efficacy of administration, and the inherent failings of human effort. Sort of the mirror-book to Scarry's, but also utterly fascinating. It's a history of disasters of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, and in an effort as huge as that, the disasters certainly exist at scale. (Interestingly, Scarry's book centers on the importance of governance in a nuclear state, or perhaps that democratic governance is not compatible with being a nuclear power.)

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4. philipkglassJul 2024
   It's a hobby. I read a lot and I have enough formal education to digest primary sources (mostly; my highest qualification is auditing a neutronics course while in grad school).

   If you too would like to know way more about nuclear weapons than is useful in civilian life, I'd recommend reading:

   Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb

   The nuclear weapons FAQ, authored by Carey Sublette, a hobbyist researcher who is extraordinarily dedicated to understanding nuclear weapons from declassified documents and physical principles: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html

   Anne C. Fitzpatrick's dissertation Igniting the Light Elements: The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Weapon Project, 1942-1952: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/10596

   The Arms Control Wonk blog/podcast: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/

   Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein's blog Restricted Data: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/

   The nuclear weapons subreddit, particularly posts on it authored by Alex Wellerstein, Carey Sublette, and a few others whose names currently escape me: https://old.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/

   Chuck Hansen's book "U.S Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History" (out of print, sadly; will have to pay $$$ or find a scanned pirate copy) and his massive book/PDF "The Swords of Armageddon" available for purchase here: http://www.uscoldwar.com/

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5. gjkoodOct 2021
   Just searched for Hansen's book on Amazon. The only one available was 'U.S. Nuclear Weapons the Secret History'. Steep price, $159 for a used copy.
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6. hackuserMar 2017
   This is the fourth among the U.S. nuclear weapons institutions that I've read is in trouble, going back several years:

   1) Air Force ICBM launch operations: The General in charge had a serious drinking problem (consider that for a moment), to the extent that he went on a bender in Moscow. Among launch officers, there was widespread cheating on qualification tests, disregard for regulations (such as sealing doors to secure rooms), and very low morale.

   2) Air Force nuclear bomber operations: At one point, they lost track of a nuclear bomb (or maybe cruise missile), and it was flown to a base in another part of the country before anyone figured it out and could track it down. The Secretary of Defense fired the General in charge.

   3) Security at facilities containing highly enriched uranium/plutonium (the essential material to making weapons; the one component that keeps terrorists from making one): At one facility, some peace protestors (not James Bond-level attackers) breached the security and setup a protest next to a building containing the materials. They were there for something like 30 minutes before they were discovered and apprehended.

   4) And now this.

   This isn't a system that can succeed 99.999% of the time. If one nuclear weapon gets into the hands of someone willing to lose it, millions of people will die and then you can imagine the response - the course of history and civilization will change.

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