Weapons & Warfare

In Firepower, acclaimed historian Paul Lockhart tells the story of the evolution of weaponry and how it transformed not only the conduct of warfare, but also the very structure of power in the West....

The virus now known as Stuxnet was unlike any other piece of malware built before: Rather than simply hijacking targeted computers or stealing information from them, it proved that a piece of code could escape the digital realm and wreak actual, physical destruction....

The Dead Hand is the suspense-filled story of the people who sought to brake the speeding locomotive of the arms race, then rushed to secure the nuclear and biological weapons left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union—a dangerous legacy that haunts us even today....

A fresh window on American history: the eye-opening truth about the government's secret plans to survive a catastrophic attack on US soil, even if the rest of us die....

Tested and effective leadership and teaching advice based on riveting combat stories from a Special Operations veteran....

Authors Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff take a riveting inside look at an elite unit within the Pentagon—the Defense Innovation Unit, also known as Unit X—whose mission is to bring Silicon Valley’s cutting-edge technology to America’s military.

The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg's hair-raising insider's account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization....

The End of Victory recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC)....

The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city....

In this comprehensive guide to the most widespread conflict in contemporary history, Vladislav Zubok traces the origins of the Cold War in post-war Europe, through the tumultuous decades of confrontation, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond.

This book by military strategist Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., is the definitive take on the race for military dominance in the twenty-first century....

This is the story of a British deterrent. Much has been written about the V-bombers—the Valiant, Victor, and Vulcan—but virtually nothing has been said about their strategic nuclear strike role.

A revelatory history of how postcolonial African Independence movements were systematically undermined by one nation above all: the US....

The world is currently closer to superpower conflict than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. World War III is a real possibility, and with 12,000 warheads in the arsenals of more than half a dozen countries, we are standing on a nuclear knife edge.

In 1969 the US Air Force issued a statement that read‚ "No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security." This statement has been proven untrue....

The ramifications of the Manhattan Project are with us to this day. The atomic bombs that came out of it brought an end to the war in the Pacific, but at a heavy loss of life in Japan and the opening of a Pandora's box that has tested international relations....

It began with plutonium, the first element ever manufactured in quantity by humans. In a matter of months, the Hanford nuclear facility was built to produce and weaponize the enigmatic and deadly new material that would fuel atomic bombs....

Jeremy Scahill and his colleagues at the investigative website The Intercept expose stunning new details about America's secret assassination policy....

For more than half a century, the United States has been pursuing a grand imperial strategy with the aim of staking out the globe...

General Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer were the two men chiefly responsible for the building of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, code name The Manhattan Project. Edward Teller assesses General Groves' contributions—and Oppenheimer's—while reflecting on the awesome legacy of their work.

A sweeping history of tragic genius, cutting-edge science, and the discovery that changed billions of lives - including your own....

Prize-winning historian Leo McKinstry's vivid history of the Spitfire brings together a rich cast of characters and firsthand testimonies....

Flamethrowers, poison gases, incendiary bombs, the large-scale spreading of disease...are these terrifying agents and implements of warfare modern inventions? Not by a long shot....

The Shogun's Last Samurai Corps tells the thrilling story of the Shinsengumi - the legendary corps of Samurai warriors tasked with keeping order in Kyoto during the final chaotic years of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1600-1868)....

Nuclear weapons are, today, as important as they were during the Cold War, and some experts say we could be as close to a nuclear catastrophe now as we were at the height of that conflict. Despite that, conversations about these bombs generally often happen in past tense.