Books like Almighty — picked by fans

This is one of the best books ever written! It won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, the National Book, and the National Book Critics Circle Awards. It traces the history of nuclear weapons from the discovery of nuclear fission through the Manhattan Project.

This epic (i.e., very long!) work describes the science, people, and politics that led to the research, development, demonstration, and deployment of the first nuclear weapon. The book reads like an H.G. Wells novel, writing about the actors in this chronicle of the scientists who enhanced quantum theory and applied it to thermonuclear fission, including Bohr, Fermi, Lawrence, Oppenheimer, Planck, Szilard, Teller, and von Neumann: the characters in the Oppenheimer film. Even if you do not finish it, you must start it! 

I really enjoyed Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award-winning Oppenheimer movie, and this book is the perfect book to read after watching it. Hiroshima was the first widespread account of what Oppenheimer’s creation – the atomic bomb – did to the people of Hiroshima.

Written in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear bombing, Hiroshima tells the story of six men and women who survived amidst the destruction that killed over 100,000 other people. By focusing on these six survivors, Hersey makes the almost unimaginable scale of destruction achingly real and relatable. At one point, he describes "the wounded as silent as the dead around them," and this line sends shivers down my spine. 

Few writers can conduct such detailed investigative reporting and tell the story in such a human way that still resonates today, nearly 80 years after it was first published. 

I didn’t have the time or energy for this tome of a book on Harry Truman. Hence, I'd never have read it had it not been ‘assigned’ by the book club I was in.

But I was mesmerized from the first pages. And felt connected to this unobtrusive, somewhat unattractive man who was in every way ordinary. But who became the president during the last days of World War ll. A man who thought and spoke clearly. A man who seemed to personify the virtues without calling them that.

I learned a great deal from this book.

Published in 1965 and written by then Washington and foreign correspondent of Time Magazine Lamont, this book remains for me an exceptionally compelling narrative history.

The lens here is focused tightly on the events leading up to the first-ever test of an atomic bomb, which was codenamed “Trinity.” Obsessively researched, yes, but it’s Lamont’s writing that makes readers feel as though they are there, in the vastness of the desert, witnessing a happening that changed the world forever.

Jacobsen’s terrifying account of how rapidly global nuclear destruction can happen is why I’ve already recommended it to many colleagues and friends. It reminded me of Jonathon Schell’s The Fate of the Earth that was one of the factors in my decision to join the Bethlehem Peace Pilgrimage.

By describing the interlocking U.S. launch detection, command and control, and delivery systems, Nuclear War provides readers with a realistic series of events that demonstrate the dangers of maintaining nuclear arsenals. Even though I have read scores of books regarding nuclear weapons over the last 45 years, this book gave me new insights and renewed my sense of urgency to achieve a world without these destructive weapons.

In the whole of military history, no year was more important than 1945. Why? Because it introduced nuclear weapons to the world and the world to nuclear weapons. Both before and after Hiroshima new weapons have always affected the way war is waged; whereas nuclear ones, by threatening to turn even the “victor” into a radioactive desert, have cast doubt on the purpose for which may be waged and even whether it can be waged at all. 

As the current war in Ukraine has shown once again, provided both sides have a credible second-strike capability using nuclear weapons to win a war is impossible. So what can they be used for and how? Proceeding step by step Schelling, a Nobel-Prize winning professor of game theory, provides the answers in ways that not only have not been improved upon since the book was published in 1965 but are… show more.

Ellsberg’s last book focused more clearly on his work on nuclear planning within the Department of Defense, where Secrets had mostly concerned itself with Vietnam.

The book provides a chilling account of how tenuous and fragile a system based on nuclear deterrence remains. Much more than that, the book is a clarion call for all of its readers to be alive to the morality of the very existence of nuclear weapons.

In 1958 Edward Teller, the father of the H bomb, and the United States Government wanted to explode six mega-ton bombs, forty miles from an Inupiat village on the coast of the Bering Sea in arctic Alaska. Project Chariot was to be the first in a line of proposed projects using nuclear bombs for creating info structure. The explosions were intended to create a deep-water port. Read how a small Inupiat village, a handful of scientists, and a few conservationists took on the US government and won, in the process, birthed the modern conservation movement in the United States. Well written, informative, inspirational, and a joy to read.

I found it very interesting how this book provides the background of the development of Soviet nuclear science and the creation of the atomic and hydrogen bombs in the Soviet Union.

It is written by a historian; the narrative is accurate yet accessible. It helped me understand how a country having suffered terrible losses in a devastating war and obsolete infrastructure could become one of the two mightiest superpowers due to its ruthless concentration of resources to a chosen goal and a group of scientists among the world’s best. 

This is a collection of Oppenheimer’s essays and speeches, a good thing to read to get a sense of the man himself, how he thinks, how he handles language.

How he struggles to suggest how civilization might begin to cope with the reality that new weapons now exist capable of annihilating civilization... “unless we show,” he says, ”urged by our own example and conviction, that we regard nuclear armament as a transitory, dangerous and degrading phase of the world’s history.”

He said that forty years ago, and counting.