Showing results for "casper andersen"

Using a wide range of primary sources that include correspondence, diaries, technical reports, institutional minutes and periodicals, Andersen reconstructs the networks and activities of Britain’s engineers while focusing on London as a centre of imperial expansion.

Seconds to Midnight is a concise history of nuclear weapons, tracing their development from the scientific breakthroughs of the 1930s to the Cold War arms race between East and West, and on to today’s nuclear hotspots in India, North Korea, Taiwan, and Iran. The book also explores efforts to contain this danger through international treaties, scientific advocacy, and public protest movements—responses to what remains one of the most serious threats to global security and human survival. By...

From the eighteenth century until the 1950s the British Empire was the biggest political entity in the world. The territories forming this empire ranged from tiny islands to vast segments of the world's major continental land masses. The British Empire left its mark on the world in a multitude of ways, many of them permanent. In this Very Short Introduction, Ashley Jackson introduces and defines the British Empire, reviewing its historiography by answering a series of key questions: What w...

"Groundbreaking . . . Wellerstein peels back the layers of the nuclear onion to reveal a rich debate about what should be kept secret and why." — NatureThe first full history of US nuclear secrecy, from its origins in the late 1930s to our post–Cold War present.The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were e...

From the Great Exhibition's showcasing of British national achievement in 1851 to the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Stratford in 2012 and on to Brexit, an insightful exploration of the transformation of modern BritainThis revised and updated fourth and final volume in the concise Brief History of Britain series begins in the specially-constructed Crystal Palace, three times the length of St Paul's Cathedral, in Hyde Park at the beginning of the second half ...

From the pilot's seat in the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, to Chernobyl's exclusion zone and to the site in Finland where highly radioactive waste will be buried, this is the incredible story of nuclear power.Providing a vivid account of the characters and events that have shaped the world's most controversial energy source and our thinking around it, The Power of Nuclear weaves politics, culture and technology to explore nuclear power's past and ...

The British Empire, wrote Adam Smith, 'has hitherto been not an empire, but the project of an empire' and John Darwin offers a magisterial global history of the rise and fall of that great imperial project. The British Empire, he argues, was much more than a group of colonies ruled over by a scattering of British expatriates until eventual independence. It was, above all, a global phenomenon. Its power derived rather less from the assertion of imperial authority than from the fusing togeth...

A warning to humankind from one of the world’s greatest physicists'What drives these pages is the guilty conscience of my profession, theoretical physics. My sole aim is to help avert what seems to me to be the unintended, yet scarcely avoidable, end point of the current politics of the governments we have elected: nuclear war.'The world is rearming and embroiled in endless conflict. The Doomsday Clock has now been set to 85 seconds to midnight, wi...

First published as part of the best-selling The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew's Very Short Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Britain is a sharp but subtle account of remarkable economic and social change and an even more remarkable political stability. Britain in 1789 was overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, multilingual, and almost half Celtic. By 1914, when it faced its greatest test since the defeat of Napoleon, it was largely ...

A sweeping history of the geopolitics behind the nuclear arms race, from the first atomic bomb to today’s rush to stockpile nuclear weapons.The nuclear age came into existence with the explosion of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. The inauguration of this new era was epitomized by the bomb’s principal creator, J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Since then, the era of th...

"The questions [raised] about the sustainability of current American foreign policy thinking are particularly timely." — Wall Street JournalThe cold war ended decades ago, and with its end came a reduction in the threat of nuclear weapons—a luxury that we can no longer indulge. It's not just the threat of Iran getting the bomb or North Korea doing something rash; the whole complexion of global power politics is changing because of the reem...

Marking the third centenary of the office of Prime Minister, this book tells its extraordinary story, explaining how and why it has endured longer than any other democratic political office in world history. Sir Anthony Seldon, historian of Number 10 Downing Street, explores the lives and careers, loves and scandals, successes and failures, of all our great Prime Ministers. From Robert Walpole and William Pitt the Younger, to Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher, Seldon discusses which of ...