Hill Williams is the son of the guy who ran the local paper in Hanford, WA during the Manhattan Project. That makes for a pretty interesting insider'sHill Williams is the son of the guy who ran the local paper in Hanford, WA during the Manhattan Project. That makes for a pretty interesting insider's view of the development of the Hanford site. Williams also shows a nice ability to be pretty neutral on hot topics (pun intended). The book is a little all over the place in that it skips big pieces of Manhattan Project history, but mostly that's because he's focusing on the Hanford site specifically. His coverage of the Bikini Atoll atrocities (I don't think I'm going too far by using that word) is excellent. It's not exactly comprehensive, but it's very accessible and I haven't read it covered as succinctly or sensibly elsewhere.
This is a really great book. Unfortunately, at the end the author spins into a little bit of a political whirlwind, that ends up making very little seThis is a really great book. Unfortunately, at the end the author spins into a little bit of a political whirlwind, that ends up making very little sense to me. He's pretty balanced up to that point.
Other complaints: He really skips over most of the Cold War and doesn't go into the politics of nuclear weapons design (or tactics/strategy) in as much detail as I would have liked.
However, his treatments of the European pre-Manhattan-Project and North American Manhattan-Project eras are really great. So is his coverage of the early days of radiation research.
Well worth reading for anyone interested in popular histories of nuclear technology....more
I bought this book after seeing the author on The Rachel Maddow Show a while back talking about the recent scandal regarding the USAF's missile commanI bought this book after seeing the author on The Rachel Maddow Show a while back talking about the recent scandal regarding the USAF's missile command. Unfortunately, I was hugely disappointed. I would have been less so if the book stuck to the Damascus Accident and gave me way less of the only peripherally relevant background. Lengthy discursions into salty anecdotes about nutty old Curtis LeMay, cranky Truman and grandfatherly Eisenhower seem non-illustrative and not particularly well treated here.
Every mainstream writer on a technical topic like this has to ask: To wonk or not to wonk? The author of this volume chose not to wonk, about what is perhaps the wonkiest topic on the planet... a topic IMPOSSIBLE to comprehend or even conceive of without wonking the living hell out of it.
The result is like a NBC suit washed in warm water.
The problem is that the Titan II accident in Damascus was fundamentally different than other nuclear weapons accidents, and is, in fact, enormously atypical. The author goes into so much detail about the propellant handling specific to the Titan II program that it becomes super-confusing just what his point is with regard to the broader schema of "command and control." Most of the broken arrow incidents cited outside Damascus stem from misrouting or mishandling of warheads or mishaps aboard airplanes (particularly B-52s, by dint of numerological likelihood), not ICBMs. The author's own assertion (that "this happened a lot") establishes that Damascus is not an illustrative example of the dangers of handling nuclear weapons.
That fundamental cognitive dissonance required the author to stray too far from the events of the Damascus Accident, and make numerous points which really had little to do with Damascus. The author didn't do a stellar job of connecting the dots, in my opinion. There ARE those connections, but it would have taken a fairly huge revision of the book to fit them in.
I believe the author needed to answer one question: Is this book PRIMARILY about 1) the command and control of nuclear warheads, or 2) the hazards of their delivery vehicles? If it's about both (which it is, or tries to be), then the fundamental connections between those two need to be stated more clearly, with a more succinct expression of the nuclear fundamentals and less reliance on the reader's "awe" of technology to produce an emotional response.
Here's what I mean: because the author does not appear to be a nuclear engineer (or even a physics nerd), it never felt clearly established to me what the core differences between nuclear and conventional weapons are from a command and control perspective. It may seem obvious, but it's actually only obvious from a non-wonk perspective. I know this probably makes me sound like a zany Buck Turgidson whack-job, but hey, it's not the first time. Wonks make policy. Wonks decide how to handle nuclear weapons. Wonks run the scenarios on what will happen if nuclear weapons are ever used. Wonks may be geeky to a fault, but they're who ACTUALLY give a damn about extreme scenarios like nuclear war or nuclear accidents. In writing what SHOULD have been a colossally wonky book, the author showed his tendency to think of both the military and nuclear worlds from a "mainstream" (non-wonk) perspective.
One example is that the hazards of nuclear detonations are portrayed in an overblown, hand-wringing fashion. BECAUSE I REALLY NEEDED THIS GUY TO TELL ME THAT NUKING THE WORLD IS A BAD IDEA. There's a subtle form of hysterical pretension throughout that I found both problematic (from a policy perspective) and dull (from a reading-pleasure perspective). Honestly, the difference is kind of slight between realistic evaluation of worst-case scenarios and pseudo-journalistic hysteria, but something about this book's tone seemed well outside realism and into facts stated as shock value.
The underlying issue from a writer's perspective is that nuclear accidents and nuclear detonations (actual or potential) are particularly susceptible to "correct" facts being blurted out with the intent to shock. Nuclear reactions (weapons-related or power-related) are unfamiliar and counter-intuitive to most if not all humans (even nuclear engineers, physicists and chemists, etc.).
But the chemical reactions involved in large-scale rocketry, like that used in ICBMs and in the Titan II program specifically, are just as unfamiliar...therefore, just as prone to correct facts being delivered with the intent to shock.
I felt like the author indulged in a lot of that "shock treatment," resulting in a somewhat uneven tone. I thought he never really stopped "gee-whizzing" about how wacky the technology is long enough to get around to a cogent policy analysis or even a sense of what policies were being changed (or not).
There are some valuable lessons in here, for which I am grateful, but with its uneven tone and unclear goals, this book was a slog to get through....more
This book did not feel overly coherent, but I still enjoyed it. It consists of too many disparate anecdotes to feel like an incisive analysis or histoThis book did not feel overly coherent, but I still enjoyed it. It consists of too many disparate anecdotes to feel like an incisive analysis or history of the crisis. Nonetheless, many of its pieces parts are GREAT. Most interesting is the author's takedown of Kennedy-as-Messiah theories of the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the end of the book. I am a big admirer of Kennedy in many respects, but his handling of the Crisis was not above reproach. The author takes the view that reason prevailed on both sides, and that there was no eye-to-eye stand-off, but a more complicated interaction of clusterfuck and close call. Dobbs is not quite a proponent of the "sheer dumb luck" view that Robert McNamara took in later years, but he certainly gives that idea a fair hearing, in a compelling and chilling way. I also very much enjoyed the very vivid vignettes about front-line pilots and ship crews interacting. The Russian side of the conflict is not as well represented as the American, but there is more info about the Russian perception than in previous English-language books on the subject.
Overall, a decent read and an interesting take on the Crisis and the cold war....more
William McKeown's "Idaho Falls, about the Idaho Falls SL-1 reactor incident in 1961, may be the most awful non-fiction book I have ever read -- and beWilliam McKeown's "Idaho Falls, about the Idaho Falls SL-1 reactor incident in 1961, may be the most awful non-fiction book I have ever read -- and believe me, there's a hell of a lot of competition for that "honor."
I can't possibly go into everything I hate about this book, since there's probably more words to be written about how bad this book is than there is in the original work. This is a textbook example of how bad popular science writing can be. Imagine The Hot Zone with ONLY the overwrought tones of terror present in the most overblown scary segments about how ebola rips you apart from the inside. Now imagine that kind of narrative style applied to such speculative scenes as how much liquor was consumed by Idaho Falls workers on a given night, or what a husband and wife or a commanding officer and subordinate may have said to each other while they were having a fight...in 1960.
What it boils down to is that the author tries to whip up drama from complete speculation, using overheated language for the most simplistic claims. He goes into great detail about very sketchy personal interactions, speculating wildly about what happened off the record -- which is not a hanging offense -- and, far worse, doing so in a crazed, overheated narrative voice that made me feel like I have been buttonholed at a backyard party by a crazed conspiracy theorist whose conspiracies are without a doubt the MOST BORING CONSPIRACIES IN HISTORY.
Obviously, this is a book that's been padded from relatively sketchy information. The author does not really seem to understand the milieu of nuclear power, and repeatedly refers to atoms buzzing like "angry bees." Such language is ridiculous the first time, and by what seems like the ten thousandth, the author has completely exhausted any chance of being taken seriously in my mind.
This dissonance becomes particularly evident near the end, when the author introduces some essentially unrelated questions (in quotations) about nuclear waste, as if it is a huge revelation, and as profound as the author thinks every other word in this book is. Unfortunately, such a sentiment is pretty pointless...since the SL-1 incident had nothing at all to do with waste. It was an operational accident, not a waste accent. That just goes to illustrate the incoherence central to this book's narrative. As a reader, I was let with no real picture of what actually happened, in operational terms, or what the institutional failings were that led to the SL-1 incident. That makes the author's completely credulous delivery of the "suicide" and "love triangle" hypotheses seem like I've stumbled on to the set of The Jerry Springer Show.
Ultimately, the lack of credibility in this book is not about specific problems but about something ineffable. I felt like the author either knows virtually nothing about nuclear history, or is simply a terrible writer...and not that smart. I find that last point somewhat impolite of me to make, and unlikely. But I can't resist making it after suffering through this book's delirious overblown and largely content-free narrative.
I'm not suggesting there's not a story in the Idaho Falls incident, but this author was apparently unable to find it. Instead, he gave us an incoherent mess of a book with a clear agenda to whip the reader up into a frenzy.
Avoid this book like you would a swarm of angry bees. ...more
This book is a reasonable read for those very interested in considering some of the issues covered in great detail, but it's curiously short on detailThis book is a reasonable read for those very interested in considering some of the issues covered in great detail, but it's curiously short on detail itself. Worse, it's dry as hell. I didn't think it was all that insightful, or contained all that much detail of interdiction efforts from a professional perspective. Though there is some worthwhile material in here, it is a book that felt very much to me like it was putting on airs. Levi seems to think he's writing the Gospels, and it shows. His recommendations are abstract, undetailed, and pretentiously simplistic. This problem could have been solved, and the book rendered readable, with a lot more case studies. As it is, I would not recommend this to anyone except those very interested in nuclear materials interdiction policy, and I wouldn't put it anywhere near the top of the list for them....more
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