Building The Bombs A History Of The Nuclear Weapons Complex Third Edition

Building the Bombs, A History of the Nuclear Weapons Complex, Third Edition

Building the Bombs

From the Back Cover: The Nuclear Weapons Complex (NWC) is a nationwide group of government-owned sites that is responsible for the design, development, production, modification, repair, assemble, disassembly, and testing of all nuclear weapons in the U S stockpile. The NWC has evolved since the beginning of the Manhattan Project in 1942 to meet national security objectives. It has met these objectives by: building the weapons that ended World War II; building a stockpile of weapons that served as a deterrent to the Soviet Union during the Cold War; incorporating new technologies into the stockpile; safely downsizing the stockpile and dismantling the excess nuclear weapons after the Cold War was over, and ensuring that the remaining stockpile is safe and reliable. This book provides a high level summary of this story. It begins in 1905 with Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and his famous equation, E=mc2, and ends in the year 2001 with a discussion of the post-Cold War challenges for the NWC. It explains how and why the NWC grew from three sites at the start of the Manhattan Project to over fifty sites at the height of the Cold War, to eight sites-three laboratories, four production plants and one test site-after the Cold War ended.

Nuclear Energy

Nuclear Energy: An Introduction to the Concepts, Systems, and Applications of Nuclear Processes, Eighth Edition, provides essential information on basic nuclear physics, systems and the applications of nuclear energy. It comprehensively covers Basic Concepts, Radiation and Its Uses, and Nuclear Power, providing students with a broad view of nuclear energy and science in a fast-paced format that features updated, timely content on topics of new and growing importance to current and future nuclear professionals, such as tritium-powered betavoltaic integrated circuit chips, the modulation of radioactive decay constant due to solar activity, Monte Carlo radiation transport calculations and accelerator-driven systems. This book is an essential resource for any first course on nuclear energy and systems. - Contains coverage of timely topics, such as the connection between hydraulic fracturing (fracking), radioactivity and nuclear forensics - Covers the TerraPower traveling wave reactor, the first ever FDA approved drug for the treatment of acute radiation injury, and more - Describes the industry response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, including FLEX in the U.S. - Includes more worked examples and end of chapter exercises