A primer on nuclear weapons, from the science of fission and fusion to the pursuit of mutual assured destruction, the SALT treaties, and the Bomb in pop culture.Although the world’s attention has shifted to drone-controlled bombing and cyberwarfare, the threat of nuclear war still exists. There are now fourteen thousand nuclear weapons in the hands of the nine declared nuclear powers. Even though the world survived the Cold War, we need to understand what it means ...

The riveting story of a modern age scientific feud between two Nobel Prize-winning scientists over the nature of cosmic rays and the universe.Set in a revolutionary era of physics and science when a series of rapid-fire discoveries was upending our understanding of the universe, Splinters of Infinity by Mark Wolverton tells a little-known story: the tale of two of America’s foremost physicists, Robert Millikan (1868–1953) and Arthur Compton (1892–1962), wh...

“Last September the United States drew a thin curtain of radiation around the earth…The feat was regarded by some of its leading participants as the greatest scientific experiment of all time.” ―Walter Sullivan, the New York Times, March 19, 1959After the Soviet Union proved to the United States that it possessed an operational intercontinental ballistic missile with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the world watched anxiously as the two superpowers ...

Set in a revolutionary era of physics and science when a series of rapid-fire discoveries was upending our understanding of the universe, Splinters of Infinity by Mark Wolverton tells a little-known story: the tale of two of America's foremost physicists, Robert Millikan (1868–1953) and Arthur Compton (1892–1962), who found themselves locked in an intense, often deeply personal, conflict about cosmic rays. Confirmed in 1912, cosmic rays—enigmatic forms of penetrating radiation—see...