Military, Scientific, and Technological
Nuclear War: A Scenario
By Annie Jacobsen. Dutton, 2024, 400 pp.
In this work of creative nonfiction, Jacobsen urges readers to fear a nuclear war even more than they already do, imagining a terrifying scenario that ends in Armageddon. She describes in graphic detail not only the consequences of nuclear detonations but also all the systems that would be employed to track incoming missiles, try to intercept them, help get the U.S. president and other senior officials to safety as they work out how to respond, and authorize a nuclear retaliation. In the scenario she describes, nothing goes right. Two North Korean missiles take out a nuclear power station in California and central Washington, D.C. The Kremlin perceives the massive U.S. nuclear response as an attack on Russia, and one thing follows another to catastrophe.The original North Korean attack comes out of the blue—the author does not describe a prior crisis or why North Korea has launched the strike when the inevitable response is its own obliteration.The dire conclusion of the book supposes that Washington will be unable to communicate with Moscow and head off the calamity. It is good to remind readers of the insanity of a nuclear war, but a less overheated plot might have done the job better.
Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons
By Sarah Scoles. Bold Type Books, 2024, 272 pp.
The west of the United States is home to many of the research and production facilities connected to the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore labs, and also to Scoles, a science journalist living in Colorado who took advantage of her proximity to visit the facilities and talk to the staff. Her investigations are particularly salient today, thanks to the heightened awareness of nuclear risks resulting from Russia’s war against Ukraine and the U.S. government’s decision to manufacture new plutonium pits for its nuclear warheads. She offers a valuable and measured exploration of the motivations of the people she meets, mainly scientists but also antinuclear activists. In the process, she paints a vivid picture of the complex world of nuclear weapons, describing computer simulations that assess whether weapons that can’t be tested will work, systems that can detect detonations anywhere in the world, and the agencies that prepare to deal with nuclear accidents. She shows how nuclear scientists balance less satisfying, mission-directed work with research into fundamental scientific problems, and she sees these figures as “peaceful people who nevertheless hold nuclear deterrence in their hearts.”
Death Dust: The Rise, Decline, and Future of Radiological Weapons Programs
By William C. Potter, Sarah Bidgood, Samuel Meyer, and Hanna Notte. Stanford University Press, 2023, 230 pp.
Given all the attention devoted to nuclear and chemical weapons programs, it is remarkable how little has been accorded to radiological weapons, bombs that “disperse radioactive material in the absence of a nuclear detonation.” In recent years, governments have fretted about terrorists acquiring so-called dirty bombs that would cause panic without massive destruction. This welcome book fills a gap in the scholarship by looking at how states—notably the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as Egypt and Iraq—researched and developed these weapons in the twentieth century. These Cold War–era programs did not get far because radiological weapons seemed to have less potential than chemical or nuclear weapons. The Egyptians were keen on nonconventional weapons, but they were dependent on German scientists, and their program was short-lived. The Iraqis made more progress, but their program still faced technical difficulties, and Baghdad left it marginalized and underfunded.
In True Face: A Woman’s Life in the CIA, Unmasked
By Jonna Mendez, with Wyndham Wood. PublicAffairs, 2024, 320 pp.
Mendez’s engaging memoir of her life in the CIA, in which she served from 1966 to 1993, has two main themes. One is familiar: the challenges talented women of her generation faced as they tried to make careers in areas that had traditionally been reserved for men. She joined the CIA as a “contract wife,” given a job so she could travel with her first husband, John, who was already in the agency. In this supporting role, she was given gainful but undemanding work. But Mendez was both ambitious and clever, and she sought out and eventually got more interesting assignments, but only after confronting continual, and in some instances extreme, misogyny. Her career provides the second theme: the importance of the technical services that support the agency’s clandestine work. This emerges as she progresses from working with film to developing disguises for agents in the field, which on occasion required her to go into the field herself. These sections are full of fascinating details about the techniques agents use, from the highly sophisticated to the hastily improvised. She is particularly proud of a mask that she pulled off her own face in front of President George H. W. Bush to reveal her true identity.
Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Agent A12 and the Solving of the Holocaust Code
By Jason Bell. Pegasus Books, 2024, 352 pp.
Until recently, the Canadian academic Winthrop Bell was known largely as a talented philosopher, a student of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in the early twentieth century.The Canadian journalist Jason Bell (no relation) was curious to learn more and, in the course of his research, chanced on an extraordinary trove of Winthrop’s personal papers. This enabled him to put together a hitherto unknown story about how Bell, who had been interned in Germany during World War I, used his excellent German and many connections to describe the country’s turmoil after the war for the benefit of the British secret services and government. He used the cover of being a Reuters correspondent to supply information to the British. Bell warned of the danger of causing German economic degradation and saw the rise of anti-Semitism on the German right, preceding the formation of the Nazi Party. The diaries demonstrate his perspicacity and influence, but his efforts were not quite enough to persuade the French to soften their stance at the Versailles peace conference in 1919, where the victors of the war chose to levy a heavy economic penalty on Germany. The core story is remarkable in itself, but the wealth of detail about Germany in the years after World War I and the inner workings of British espionage makes it doubly so.