| View Larger Image | Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons | Paperbackby Joseph Cirincione (Author)
| List Price: | $18.95 | | Price: | $10.59 | | You Save: | $8.36 (44%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Columbia University Press | | Edition: | 1st Edition | | Page Count: | 224 Pages | | Publication Date: | June 23, 2008 | | Sales Rank: | 246,568th |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
"A welcome antidote to the strange confluence of nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT) opponents." -- Christopher F. Chyba, Science |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 16 reviews)
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Good guy by NJstudent  5 Stars
February 22, 2009
He had shipped the book on time, but it never arrived. It was not his fault, but he still refunded the money. I would still do business with him again.
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Everything You Need to Know About Nuclear Weapons by Robert Weekley (Virginia, USA)  4 Stars
February 19, 2009
Living with nuclear weapons for over half a century, many people have little appreciation for their immense destructive power and the increasing probability that they will be used in anger or detonated by accident. Most policy experts see the world on the verge of a binge in proliferation. This slender book succinctly reviews the history, explains the technology needed by the layman to understand the problem, and, most importantly, lays out the choices facing the United States and the world to reduce and eliminate the possibility of their use in the future by terrorists or nation states. The book is well referenced and balanced.
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A useful primer by Alan A. Elsner (Washington DC)  3 Stars
January 29, 2009
This book contains a useful brief history of nuclear weapons. It reminds us of the massive arms build-up of the 1950s and 1960s and how the world came to the brink of annihilation in the Cuban missile program. It also puts into perspective international nonproliferation efforts which have enjoyed considerable success in slowing the spread of such weapons. Finally, it reminds us that arms control agreements beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the late 1980s have dramatically reduced stockpiles making us all safer.
Latter chapters look at the Iraqi nuclear program and rehash tired arguments about the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq without adding anything new.
I have two main criticism. First, we don't get enough detail about how nuclear weapons spread to Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea and elsewhere. We hear nothing about the Israeli program; likewise there is no real assessment of the state of the North Korean program. The author seems relatively complacent about the Iranian program, contrary to other sources who believe it is well-advanced and on the brink of producing a weapon within two or three years.
Second, the book often reads like a policy-wonk briefing paper from a Washington think-tank (which I guess it is). The author could and should have tried harder to write regular English for ordinary readers.
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Highly recommended & a great read by Michael J. McKenzie (North Palm Beach, Florida United States) 5 Stars
September 28, 2008
Joseph Cirincione has provided us with a wonderful, concise history of nuclear weapons and the diplomacy behind the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the atomic era. At 224 pages it is a quick, well written and very informative read and a fantastic introduction to the world of atomic and thermonuclear weapons in an age when nuclear terrorism is a real threat. Readers who do not remember the cold war or students new to the subject will have to seek other source materials to get a true idea of the destructive power and horrors associated with a nuclear detonation (or full on nuclear exchange; less likely in the post cold war era), but that was not the intention of this book. A thorough understanding of the policy implications of weapons reductions strategies, the securing of loose nuclear material and preventing future nuclear states is provided, and the knowledge contained in Bomb Scare will assist voters decision making when selecting leaders to deal with these complex issues.
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Strong on policy; watch the physics by Bruce Cameron Reed 4 Stars
September 12, 2008
This book reviews the history of nuclear weapons and nonproliferation agreements and offers some solutions to the threat of nuclear terrorism as well as ideas to address lack of security of the nuclear fuel supply and preventing the development of new nuclear-weapon states. Cirincione clearly knows his policy issues and history. As often happens with policy-trained writers, however, some of the technical details get garbled: a discussion of assembly timing issues in the gun and implosion mechanisms of Little Boy and Fat Man are sufficiently garbled as to indicate that the author is unaware of the crucial role of spontaneous fission, and one also finds the patently incorrect assertion that the Sun will be able to synthesize elements as heavy as sulfur. These are quibbles in comparison to the grand themes of nonproliferation and disarmament, but one would expect an author of this experience to be more careful: policy issues can hang on technicalities. For the physics, read Bernstein, Serber, Garwin & Charpak and Hoddeson, et al. Cirincione proposes a multi-national system of assured nuclear fuel services, a sort of updated Baruch plan minus any requirement or incentive for current nuclear weapon states to decrease their arsenals. He is silent, however, concerning the resistance such a scheme would likely face from likely US suspicion of a UN-administered program and the vested interests of producers and consumers of nuclear materials and weapons. He also does not address what to do with waste fuel, not a gram of which seems likely to see the inside of Yucca Mountain anytime soon. His suggestion that Israel consider abandoning its nuclear capability without proposals for security guarantees from its neighbors seems divorced from reality.
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