COUNTDOWN TO ZERO traces the history of the atomic bomb from its origins to the present state of global affairs: nine nations possess nuclear weapons capabilities with others racing to join them, with the world held in a delicate balance that could be shattered by an act of terrorism, failed diplomacy, or a simple accident.

Written and directed by acclaimed documentarian Lucy Walker (Devil’s Playground, Blindsight), the film features an array of important international statesmen, including Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pervez Musharraf and Tony Blair.

Countdown to Zero makes a compelling case for worldwide nuclear disarmament, an issue more topical than ever with the Obama administration working to revive this goal today. Stay tuned for more information on how you can see this video with a Peace Action chapter near you.

Sign Petiton

Using baby teeth, researchers have analyzed the amount of the radioactive chemical strontium-90 in peoples’ bodies who lived in the 1960s—an era of above ground nuclear testing in the U.S. Through this research, scientists at the Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP) in New York are making the connection between strontium-90 and cancer.

Host Steve Curwood talks with the executive director of RPHP, Joseph Mangano, about this study and other studies that link a person’s proximity to nuclear power plants and cancer.

TRANSCRIPT:
Young: From the Jennifer and Ted Stanley Studios in Somerville, Massachusetts - this is Living on Earth. I'm Jeff Young.

Curwood: And I'm Steve Curwood. Nuclear radiation can cause cancer, and when America stopped testing nuclear bombs in the atmosphere in 1963, research showed a decline in the levels of dangerous fallout in people. Now scientists at the Radiation and Public Health Project have published studies that apply the methods of that research to cancer rates of people living near nuclear power plants, with some startling results. With me now is Joseph Mangano, he's an epidemiologist and the executive director of this project. Mr. Mangano, welcome to Living on Earth.

Mangano: Hi, how are you?

Curwood: Yeah, I read that you recently acquired some 85,000 baby teeth from an old World War II gunnery range in St. Louis. What's the story behind how you got those teeth and what do baby teeth have to do anyway with your research?

Mangano: To tell you how we acquired them, I'll have to go back in history a bit to 1958 – a time when the United States and Soviet Union were engaged in a nuclear arms race. A lot of people were very worried about, not just nuclear war, but about the fallout from the bomb tests, and a group of citizens and scientists in St. Louis conceived the baby tooth study, in which they collected 320,000 baby teeth.

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In March 2010, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War published a major new briefing paper on the global climate and health effects of nuclear war. Zero is the only option, produced for the 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, draws extensively from the work of climate scientists at Rutgers University and the University of Colorado at Boulder, including Alan Robock, O. B. Toon, Michael Mills, and their colleagues, who have documented the climate effects of regional nuclear war.

Zero Is the Only Option comprises four medical and environmental case studies:
1. Nuclear famine: how a regional nuclear war will cause global mass starvation
2. A nuclear ozone hole: the global cancer burden of a regional nuclear war
3. Nuclear winter: the Earth’s life-sustaining ecosystems remain at risk
4. The casualties of nuclear war: Why prevention is still the only cure

Each page of this blog reproduces a case study from the briefing paper, and provides a collection of resources for further study and for use in presenting this information to others. The complete paper, with footnotes and references, can be downloaded here. Publication of the briefing paper was made possible thanks to a generous financial contribution from IPPNW’s Swedish affiliate, Svenska Läkare mot Kärnvapen (Swedish Physicians Against Nuclear Weapons).

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Well, it depends on what you mean by progress.

United Nations member states met for most of the month of May to review the most important global treaty on nuclear disarmament, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The treaty calls for existing nuclear weapons states to get rid of their nukes, while non-nuclear states agree not to acquire them. And it guarantees access to treaty members to "peaceful uses" of nuclear energy. Depending on one's perspective, the conference outcome was a victory for global cooperation on things nuclear; an "incremental success" that staved off the prospects of total disaster; or a deeply disappointing result that avoided endorsing the most promising solution, the negotiation of a binding convention on the elimination of nuclear weapons. But first it's worth looking at why the treaty matters.

The treaty has its flaws, but it has succeeded in curbing the worst case scenario of a world of dozens of nuclear weapons states, an outcome that could have occurred without it. The question now is whether it can be strenghtened in the face of major challenges such as Pakistan and India's nuclear arsenals and North Korea and Iran's nuclear programs. And then there is the question of Israel's nuclear arsenal, which is well known to exist albeit not formally acknowledged. And there is ongoing criticism from non-nuclear states about why, 40 years after the treaty went into force, major players like the U.S., Russia, the U.K.., France and China have yet to meet their obligations under Article VI of the treaty to get rid of all of their nuclear weapons.

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A tiny fraction of the operational nuclear arsenals, if detonated within large cities, would generate enough smoke to cause catastrophic disruptions of the global climate1and massive destruction of the protective stratospheric ozone layer. Environmental devastation caused by a war fought with many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons would quickly leave the Earth uninhabitable.

Deadly Climate Change and Massive Ozone Destruction from Nuclear War

Nuclear detonations within urban and industrial areas would ignite immense firestorms which would burn everything imaginable and create millions of tons of thick, black smoke. Much of this smoke would rapidly be lofted above cloud level, into the stratosphere, where it would block warming sunlight from reaching the lower atmosphere and surface of the Earth. Sunlight would then markedly heat the upper atmosphere and cause massive destruction of the protective ozone layer, while darkness below would produce average surface temperatures on Earth characteristic of those experienced during an Ice Age.

The darkness and global cooling predicted to result from nuclear war (along with massive radioactive fallout, pyrotoxins, and ozone depletion) was first described in 1983 as “nuclear winter”. These initial studies estimated the smoke from nuclear firestorms would stay in the stratosphere for about a year. However in 2006, researchers using modern computer models found the smoke would form a global stratospheric smoke layer that would last for ten years.

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In his speech Wednesday at the National Defense University here, Vice President Joe Biden opened a new offensive in the administration’s war on nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. One near-term objective is completion and ratification of a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the United States and Russia. But the ultimate goal, he said, remained the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.

In the absence of a roadmap from a Start accord to global zero, one can only assume that Mr. Biden meant the continued pursuit of similar, incremental arms control agreements. But piecemeal control efforts will never work; we have to think more boldly if we are to achieve global nuclear disarmament.

The idea of achieving nuclear zero through arms control agreements is nothing new. It has been pursued for nearly 50 years, and it’s a tough slog, practically and politically. Indeed, such agreements take so long to negotiate and require so much political capital that presidents rarely achieve more than one. I should know: as a midlevel State Department official in 1979, I spent six months trying to persuade Midwestern voters to support that era’s arms-control proposal, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, known as SALT II. Wherever I went, I encountered opponents. Some were against specific provisions; many simply opposed any limit on American power, or wanted to deal a blow to the Carter administration.

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The end of the Cold War changed the world, and 9/11 changed it again. But despite new threats to our security, we continue to rely on outdated thinking when it comes to nuclear weapons.

What has not changed is a consensus — within the scientific and religious communities — that nuclear weapons are a global liability that makes our nation and world less secure. There are still some 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world; 95 percent are held by the United States and Russia. Many are on alert status, ready for immediate launch.

The dawn of the nuclear age unleashed the overwhelmingly destructive power of the atom, forever altering humanity’s responsibilities for life and creation. Many Manhattan Project scientists went on to become vocal proponents for nuclear reductions and safer policies.

Likewise, in the early 1980s, when the threat of nuclear war felt all too real, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a groundbreaking pastoral letter on “The Challenge of Peace,” rejecting nuclear deterrence as a “long-term basis for peace” and describing the arms race as a “folly which does not provide the security it promises.”

As a nuclear physicist and a Catholic bishop, we agree that there are both practical and moral obligations to limit the risks posed by nuclear weapons. Even if only one nuclear weapon were detonated, there would be a profound loss of human life and incalculable political, economic and environmental consequences.

Morality requires that the use of force be discriminate and proportionate, but nuclear weapons kill indiscriminately, and their widespread destruction and lingering radiation would not be proportionate in any meaningful sense.

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Linda Pentz Gunter from US advocacy group Beyond Nuclear takes a closer look at the much-lauded French nuclear industry and explains why she believes it's far from the success story it would have us think it is.

Nuclear power in France is a disaster: economically, environmentally, and from a safety, health and security perspective. If this is not the message you are used to hearing about France, where almost all the lights are turned on by reactors, here are some reasons:

First, the global nuclear industry is very good at obfuscating the truth. This is also known as lying.
Second, the French nuclear industry, in particular, is very good at not telling the public a whole lot. This is also known as secrecy.

Finally, politicians around the globe – and especially in the U.K. and U.S. – eager to do business with the French government-owned nuclear corporations, Areva and Électricité de France – are content to spout disingenuous sound bites without delving beyond the surface. This is called “not looking beyond the end of your nose.” Actually doing so would reveal some rather ugly truths – like the fact that having all your electricity eggs in one nuclear basket means producing masses of radioactive waste.

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The Department of Energy has issued a proposed rule that would actually increase risk to taxpayers from loan guarantees for construction of new nuclear reactors.

It is embarrassing and outrageous that President Obama's Energy Department would propose to place the interests of the nuclear power industry and foreign export-import banks above the interests of the American public--yet that's exactly what DOE is suggesting.

Please take a moment to send your comments to the Department of Energy and the White House here.

Background DOE's nuclear loan guarantee program was set up by Congress in 2005 and funded in 2007 at $18.5 billion for new reactors and $2 billion for new uranium enrichment plants (additional funds are available for renewable and coal technologies).

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American Planning for a Hundred Holocausts
One day in the spring of 1961, soon after my 30th birthday, I was shown how our world would end. Not the Earth, not—so far as I knew then—all humanity or life, but the destruction of most cities and people in the Northern Hemisphere. What I was handed, in a White House office, was a single sheet of paper with some numbers and lines on it. It was headed “Top Secret—Sensitive”; under that, “For the President’s Eyes Only.”

The “Eyes Only” designation meant that, in principle, it was to be seen and read only by the person to whom it was explicitly addressed, in this case the president. In practice this usually meant that it would be seen by one or more secretaries and assistants as well: a handful of people, sometimes somewhat more, instead of the scores to hundreds who would normally see copies of a “Top Secret—Sensitive” document.

Later, working in the Pentagon as the special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense, I often found myself reading copies of cables and memos marked “Eyes Only” for someone, though I was not that addressee, nor for that matter was my boss. And already by the time I read this one, as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, it was routine for me to read “Top Secret” documents. But I had never before seen one marked “For the President’s Eyes Only,” and I never did again.

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Now is the time for the United States to take the lead in negotiating the abolition of nuclear weapons. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said his country would give up nuclear weapons if everyone else that had them did the same. The overwhelming majority of nuclear weapons are in the possession of Russia and the United States and these two countries are beginning serious discussions to revive the START-plus treaty and further limit the number of nuclear weapons. They stalled largely because the Bush administration and its ideologues opposed any new weapons limits. Build more so we can destroy the planet with absolute certainty. Now that Darth Vader and his presidential sidekick are gone, there is new hope that President Obama will listen to the voices of sanity and reason and join a united effort to free ourselves of the possibility of nuclear annihilation.

The way to confront the nuclear threat posed by North Korea and Iran, and those rogue entities seeking dirty bombs, is to eliminate all the weapons and the materials to make them. Countries are hurrying to join the nuclear club because they know they will be listened to and taken seriously once they go nuclear. Iran wants nuclear weapons because Israel possesses them. Pakistan and India are ready to blow each other up and cause a nuclear winter over much of Asia because they possess them. Once a nuclear bomb is again dropped on a major city, all bets are off and Pandora’s box will never be able to be closed. The doomsday we all fear will be upon us and the United States will never be able to bomb its way to peace and security. The hard liners on the right see nuclear as a deterrent but that is foolhardy to believe once countries that possess them continue to grow.

There is a verifiable way to insure that the weapons can be destroyed under the auspices of a team of experts selected from all the countries with a stake in their destruction. It is not naïve to believe that a fool proof way can be developed. We have satellites, drones, cameras that can zoom in on your facial hair, and the ability to spy on each other. Why not let our best and brightest lead the way to insure all nuclear weapons are destroyed

The untold story of Sizewell A, one of Britain's older nuclear power plants.

From Exploration to fuel production, this documentary relates the contamination, water consumption, waste generation, costs to the American taxpayer through government subsidies, health impacts,and the CO2 emissions that are caused by the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle.

Each phase has its own devastating impact on the environment and the surrounding population, from socio-economic to health and safety. This film takes a deeper look into the facts that are, all too often, left unsaid.

America is going "Down the Yellowcake Road," but given this information, shouldn't we ask the necessary question: Is this what we really want?

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"So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," President Obama said at the open-air rally in Prague on April 5. With these words came a change in the global air, as if a window had been opened a crack in a dark room that had been sealed shut for decades. On only two previous occasions had an American president proposed the abolition of nuclear arms. The first was Truman's proposal at the United Nations in 1946 to place all nuclear technology under international control and devote it entirely to peaceful purposes, and so to strangle the nuclear age in its cradle. Stalin's Soviet Union, bent on developing the bomb, would not agree.

The second was the summit meeting at Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, where President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev came within an ace of agreeing to full nuclear disarmament. Their bid foundered on Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, which he would not give up and Gorbachev would not accept. Thereafter the pronuclear consensus was restored. Its chief assumption, embodied in the doctrine of deterrence, was that safety from nuclear weapons paradoxically depended on their continued presence. Unremitting readiness to carry out genocide and worse had somehow been accepted as an inescapable commitment of even the greatest civilizations.

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Confronting the Bomb tells the dramatic, inspiring story of how citizen activism helped curb the nuclear arms race and prevent nuclear war. This abbreviated version of Lawrence Wittner's award-winning trilogy, The Struggle Against the Bomb, shows how a worldwide, grassroots campaign—the largest social movement of modern times—challenged the nuclear priorities of the great powers and, ultimately, thwarted their nuclear ambitions.

Based on massive research in the files of peace and disarmament organizations and in formerly top secret government records, extensive interviews with antinuclear activists and government officials, and memoirs and other published materials, Confronting the Bomb opens a unique window on one of the most important issues of the modern era: survival in the nuclear age.

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Chernobyl exploded and Three Mile Island missed by a whisker. They both killed people.

But thirty years after the Pennsylvania melt-down, a Soviet-style Iron Curtain has formed between the corporate media and the alternatives, with nuclear power at its center.

The Soviets denied for days that the Chernobyl accident had happened at all. America's parallel corporate media says "no one died at TMI."

Take National Public Radio's Scott Simon. On March 28, Simon smirked on air that "no one was killed or injured" at Three Mile Island, "not so much as a sprained ankle."

Except when people are fleeing them, as they did 30 years ago, radiation releases have never been linked directly to joint sprains.

But cancer, leukemia, birth defects, stillbirths, malformations, spontaneous abortions, skin lesions, hair loss, respiratory problems, sterility, nausea, cataracts, a metallic taste, premature aging, general loss of bodily function and more can be caused by radioactive emissions of the type that poured out of TMI. And all such ailments have been documented there OUTside the corporate media.

Simon and everyone else INside the corporate media missed the well-organized, well-executed press event in the statehouse at Harrisburg on March 26. Despite solid publicity from Eric Epstein and the long-standing Three Mile Island Alert, not a single corporate reporter covered presentations by nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen and University of North Carolina epidemiologist Dr. Stephen Wing.

Once a top industry executive, Gundersen has shown that the containment at Three Mile Island Unit 2 did not completely hold, and that far more radiation was released than previously believed.

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Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev have released a (long) joint statement offering a readout of their Wednesday meeting: "Reaffirming that the era when our countries viewed each other as enemies is long over, and recognizing our many common interests, we today established a substantive agenda for Russia and the United States to be developed over the coming months and years. We are resolved to work together to strengthen strategic stability, international security, and jointly meet contemporary global challenges, while also addressing disagreements openly and honestly in a spirit of mutual respect and acknowledgement of each other's perspective.

"We discussed measures to overcome the effects of the global economic crisis, strengthen the international monetary and financial system, restore economic growth, and advance regulatory efforts to ensure that such a crisis does not happen again.

"We also discussed nuclear arms control and reduction. As leaders of the two largest nuclear weapons states, we agreed to work together to fulfill our obligations under Article VI of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and demonstrate leadership in reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world. We committed our two countries to achieving a nuclear free world, while recognizing that this long-term goal will require a new emphasis on arms control and conflict resolution measures, and their full implementation by all concerned nations. We agreed to pursue new and verifiable reductions in our strategic offensive arsenals in a step-by-step process, beginning by replacing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with a new, legally-binding treaty. We are instructing our negotiators to start talks immediately on this new treaty and to report on results achieved in working out the new agreement by July.

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WASHINGTON -- For two decades, a ridge of volcanic rock 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas known as Yucca Mountain has been the sole focus of government plans to store highly radioactive nuclear waste.

Not anymore.

Despite the $13.5 billion that has been spent on the project, the Obama administration says it's going in a different direction. It slashed funding for Yucca Mountain in its recently announced budget.

And on Thursday, Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a Senate hearing that the Yucca Mountain site no longer was viewed as an option for storing reactor waste, brushing aside criticism from several Republican lawmakers.

Instead, Chu said the Obama administration believes the nearly 60,000 tons of used reactor fuel can remain at nuclear power plants while a new, comprehensive plan for waste disposal is developed.

Chu's remarks touched off a sometimes testy exchange with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Obama's rival for the presidency last year, and provided the most definitive signal yet that the government's attempt to address the commercial nuclear waste problem is veering in a dramatically new direction.

At the hearing, McCain and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the decision not to pursue the Yucca Mountain project threatens the expansion of nuclear energy because the government can give no assurance on waste disposal.

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In a sign of the importance of non-proliferation to the new administration, President Obama has picked a “czar” to coordinate issues related to weapons of mass destruction across the government. Gary Samore, a nuclear proliferation expert and former National Security Council official now at the Council on Foreign Relations, has been tapped for the post, Samore confirmed to Congressional Quarterly.

His portfolio will be broad, he said, including proliferation, nuclear and conventional arms control, threat reduction, and terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction.
Samore offered few specifics on his approach. For example, he has called for more engagement, diplomatic and otherwise, with Iran , but he declined to say what new carrots or sticks would be on the table.

“These are all issues that, as far as I know, the administration doesn’t have a position on,” he said. Nuclear proliferation and weapons of mass destruction have been a foreign policy priority for Obama during his campaign and since taking office. He called the threat of a nuclear attack by terrorists the gravest danger to the United States and pledged to gather all the world’s loose nuclear material by the end of his first term.

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The United States spent over $52 billion on nuclear weapons and related programs in fiscal year 2008, but only 10 percent of that went toward preventing a nuclear attack through slowing and reversing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and technology. That is the main finding of Nuclear Security Spending: Assessing Costs, Examining Priorities, a new study that uses publicly available documents and extensive interviews with government officials and experts to calculate the U.S. nuclear security "budget." The United States has never tracked nuclear weapons-related spending comprehensively, hindering effective oversight and weighing of priorities in nuclear security policy.


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Jan 21st, 2009 | SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. -- At the western edge of a largely dormant anti-nuke movement, three generations of mothers are tilting at nuclear reactors. But their mission is less quixotic than it might appear.

Wielding a novel argument about the potential impact of a terrorist attack on nuclear facilities, San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace is aiming to set legal precedent requiring tougher environmental reviews for nuclear power plants and radioactive waste storage nationwide.

It's the latest chapter in a long-running battle that pits the all-volunteer group of aging hippies, activists and teachers against the federal government, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., and PG&E's Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, nestled on a gorgeous stretch of coastline nearby.

"This whole town -- it's like this veil is over our town. Of denial, is what it is," said Mothers for Peace member Linda Seeley as the group met recently in a comfy living room patrolled by a cat.

Outside, the sun shone brightly on flowers, wind chimes and Green Party lawn signs. "People come here and they think they're living in paradise," Seeley said. "And we have highly lethal poison eight miles from us."

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Seven years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, at a time when government officials and outside experts are expressing growing concern about the prospect of a nuclear 9/11, few members of Congress know how much the United States spends on nuclear security or where the money goes.

When Secretary of State-designate Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Energy-designate Steven Chu head into their Senate confirmation hearings Tuesday, they'll face difficult questions about how the U.S. is addressing nuclear dangers. Although most lawmakers would rank nuclear threats at the top of their list of national security concerns, they won't have sufficient or comprehensive information to work with. But Congress can fix this.

Our report, the first public examination of open-source data, shows that the U.S. spent at least$52.4 billion on nuclear weapons and programs in fiscal 2008. This budget, which spans many agencies, not just the Defense Department, does not count related costs for air defense, anti-submarine warfare, classified programs or most nuclear weapons-related intelligence programs.

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U.S. nuclear weapons were born nearly 65 years ago with the purpose of winning a worldwide war against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. They grew up to deter a massive Soviet army that threatened to invade and dominate all of Europe. With the disappearance of that threat almost 20 years ago, nuclear weapons entered middle age in search of a new mission -- a search that continues to this day.

Some suggest nuclear weapons are necessary to deter, or even preempt, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Others believe they are needed to destroy deeply buried, hardened targets in hostile states. But the reality is that only one real purpose remains for U.S. nuclear weapons: to prevent the use of nuclear weapons by others.

That reality has yet to sink in. U.S. nuclear policies remain stuck in the Cold War, even as the threats the United States faces have changed dramatically. Today, the gravest threat comes from the possibility of terrorists bent on delivering a devastating blow against the United States acquiring the capacity to do so with nuclear weapons. This threat is compounded by the dangers of nuclear proliferation, as more and more countries hedge against potentially negative developments in their regions by acquiring the wherewithal to build the bomb.

Then there is the increasing global demand for nuclear energy, which will spread the infrastructure necessary to produce fissile nuclear materials still wider. The world, in short, is on the verge of entering an age of more nuclear weapons states, more nuclear materials, and more nuclear facilities that are poorly secured -- making the job of the terrorists seeking the bomb easier and the odds that a nuclear weapon will be used greater.

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The election of Barack Obama has brought a new spirit of hope to the United States and the world. We now have the opportunity to chart a new course for US foreign policy and provide leadership to restore peace under international law, promote justice and reestablish America’s credibility in the world. Our time demands such leadership from the United States, which could be demonstrated by taking the following ten steps:

1. Commit to US leadership to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons. Enter into negotiations with the Russians and then the other seven nuclear weapons states to create a new treaty for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.

2. End the war in Iraq, withdraw American troops, close US military bases in Iraq and provide reparations to the people of Iraq for the damage we have caused there.

3. Pursue and bring to justice the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, using police and intelligence to address counterterrorism, and cease the US war against the Taliban.

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In 1945, after the atomic destruction of two Japanese cities, J. Robert Oppenheimer expressed foreboding about the spread of nuclear arms. “They are not too hard to make,” he told his colleagues on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M. “They will be universal if people wish to make them universal.”

That sensibility, born where the atomic bomb itself was born, grew into a theory of technological inevitability. Because the laws of physics are universal, the theory went, it was just a matter of time before other bright minds and determined states joined the club. A corollary was that trying to stop proliferation was quite difficult if not futile.

But nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth. In the six decades since Oppenheimer’s warning, the nuclear club has grown to only nine members. What accounts for the slow spread? Can anything be done to reduce it further? Is there a chance for an atomic future that is brighter than the one Oppenheimer foresaw?

Two new books by three atomic insiders hold out hope. The authors shatter myths, throw light on the hidden dynamics of nuclear proliferation and suggest new ways to reduce the threat.

Neither book endorses Oppenheimer’s view that bombs are relatively easy to make. Both document national paths to acquiring nuclear weapons that have been rocky and dependent on the willingness of spies and politicians to divulge state secrets.

Thomas C. Reed, a veteran of the Livermore weapons laboratory in California and a former secretary of the Air Force, and Danny B. Stillman, former director of intelligence at Los Alamos, have teamed up in “The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation” to show the importance of moles, scientists with divided loyalties and — most important — the subtle and not so subtle interests of nuclear states.

Voices of the Manhattan Project
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