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Originally Posted by ArmySGT.
Will THIS help set the tone and evoke the setting? |
I remember reading that "With enough shovels" book in high school. It definitely effected my becoming an anti-nuke activist in high school. We got our high school in the suburbs of NYC declared a "nuclear free zone" and marched for disarmament. The irony of having settled in the town where the atomic bomb was created and having a spouse who works on stockpile stewardship is not lost on me.
It is interesting having older friends who have retired from working at Los Alamos National Laboratory who have all sorts of crazy stories. A number of them worked on test shots in the Pacific and at the Nevada Test Site. Another was a manager on parts of the SDI program and helped lead the "dog and pony show" put on for Soviet scientists that convinced them that it was really ready to deploy. One of the demos broke the spirit of the Soviet scientist who had written a theoretical paper, but could never get the technology to work. LANL scientists then showed them a working version of what he had theorized and he cried. There are some really crazy stories.
If you want to get a different perspective on nuclear proliferation check out the book Nuclear Express by Danny Stillman (
http://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Expres...uclear+express). Stillman worked for LANL on proliferation issues and did some amazing research. There are stories that give you a completely different view of the history of nuclear weapons. Like the section that talks about the French detonating one of their test shots in Algerian early so that the site was not overrun by rebels.