Recomended Military Books: ICBMs & Nuclear Weapons

Alamagordo 'Minor Scale' Test, 27 June 1985.

Today in WW II: 9 Jul 1940 Battle of Calabria [Battle of Punta Stilo, the toe of Italy] fought between the Italian Royal Navy and the British/Australian Royal Navies, 30 miles [48km] east of Punta Stilo. More ?

9 Jul 1943 US-British invasion of Sicily begins [night of 9-10 Jul].
9 Jul 1944 British and Canadian forces capture Caen from the Germans, a critical post-D-Day objective in Normandy, France.
9 Jul 1944 US forces reach the northern end of Saipan, finding thousands of Japanese civilian men, women, and children who commit suicide by leaping off the cliffs rather than be captured.
Visit the Olive-Drab.com World War II Timeline for day-by-day events 1939-1945! See also WW2 Books.

Books About ICBMs and Nuclear Weapons

Be sure to check in the Olive-Drab section on Nuclear Weapons for atomic weapons history, details of bombs, bombers, submarines and ICBMs, website links and more book suggestions.

100 Suns by Michael Light. 208 pages (October 21, 2003) Knopf First Edition. This book is a collection of one hundred amazing photos, color and b&w, of above ground nuclear explosions, taken from recently declassified sources. Dated from World War II to 1962, the photos reveal unexpected details, colors, and effects that are hard to describe in words.

How To Photograph an Atomic Bomb by Peter Kuran. 142 pages (December 21, 2007) vce.com publisher. Using original declassified photos of nuclear bomb tests and other works such as bomb construction diagrams, the author illustrates his story of the men who took the photos in the U.S. and the Pacific islands. A secret group of highly skilled technicians, they worked at the state of the art of photography and electronics to capture photos of the release of unimaginable energy at microsecond time scales. Both a technical and artistic treat.

Now It Can Be Told : The Story of the Manhattan Project by Leslie R. Groves, Edward Teller. The secret history of the building of the first atomic bombs written by the project leaders.

On Thermonuclear War , by Herman Kahn. 2nd Edition. Hardcover. Published by Greenwood Publishing Group. Publication date: June 1978. Originally published in the 1960s, Dr. Kahn faces the grim reality of fighting and winning a nuclear war. In this book, which is based on his classified work at the Rand Corporation, he coins the phrase "the grateful dead" as well as starts the arguments which continue to this day. Now that the post-Cold War world is less stable than Kahn's two-superpower situation, if you want to know what the inner circle strategic debate is all about, read this book.

Encyclopedic coverage of U.S. nuclear weapons is provided by Nuclear Weapons of the United States: An Illustrated History , by James N. Gibson.

Tactical Nuclear Weapons: Emergent Threats in an Evolving Security Environment , by Brian Alexander, Alistair Millar is an excellent resource in its subject area.

The book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb , by Richard Rhodes is highly recommended as the best general history of the Manhattan Project. The book won a Pulitzer Prize.

If you don't find what you want in the Olive-Drab.com list of military books you can search Amazon.com for any military book or video, new or used, or any other Amazon item. The total number of books in existence is about 65 million, and Amazon's amazing inventory includes a lot of them. Amazon.com also now includes CDs with military manuals or other government publications plus their site links to third party sellers with used copies of out of print volumes. Give Amazon.com a try, no matter what you are looking for -- you will rarely be disappointed.