Frenchman Flat: The Rise and Fall of Atomic Bombs

Frenchman Flat: The Rise and Fall of Atomic Bombs

$35.94

Review Quotes: Here, for the first time in such rich, on-the-ground detail, is the rest of the story of how we walked hand in hand with Armageddon through the first eighty years of the Nuclear...

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Review Quotes:
Here, for the first time in such rich, on-the-ground detail, is the rest of the story of how we walked hand in hand with Armageddon through the first eighty years of the Nuclear Age. We still do.--Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Review Quotes:
Frenchman Flat is a sweeping, gripping history of the atomic age. Jon Else writes with precision, conjuring the Nevada Test Site's blasted landscape as both monument and warning. From the blinding flash of Priscilla to the painstaking treaty negotiations that pulled the world from the brink, Else renders this history viscerally human. It is, with humanity again under siege, a book for our times.--Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth

Review Quotes:
Vivid and unnerving, Frenchman Flat captures the nuclear 'practice' targeting of, well, most everything. He brings us to the fragmented, abandoned sites and to those who witnessed, worked, and suffered in these broken, radioactive zones. In a time of worldwide nuclear nationalism, Else memorializes and warns.--Peter Galison, author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps

Review Quotes:
No one is better qualified to write this story than Jon Else, who has been close to the subject for decades. He tells the tale with haunting, uncommon grace.--Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight

Publisher Marketing:

The story of a single nuclear bomb's deep origins, brief life during the Cold War, and lasting environmental and political legacies--as a fresh path to consider the entire sweep of the American nuclear enterprise. A grave reminder of the frightening truth about nuclear testing, as international norms waver.

As the US and Russia let one treaty after another falter and expire, this urgent book reminds us of the price of those tests. Frenchman Flat recounts the science, politics, and human experience of those who developed nuclear weapons, suffered the consequences, and fought for and against arms control between the 1940s and 1990s. The throughline of this vast, complex story is a 37-kiloton atomic bomb dubbed "Priscilla" that was exploded above a custom-built mini-civilization at Frenchman Flat, Nevada, in 1957. Jon Else uses Priscilla and the bombs that preceded and followed to highlight the terrifying ways we have stockpiled and tested nuclear weapons, how near and often we came to self-annihilation, how we managed to avoid it, and what we did to the planet and to our own bodies in the process, from wartime Los Alamos to the suspension of US and Soviet nuclear testing in 1992.

In the two decades after Hiroshima, a pair of dramatic stories unfolded alongside each other: the scramble to produce ever more powerful nuclear weapons, and the struggle to ban testing of those same weapons. The dramatic narrative takes in the physics of the megaton postwar bombs, the role of private industry, the near misses of the Cuban Missile Crisis and less well-known events, and the testimony of scientists, politicians, doctors, weapons developers, test-site workers, ranchers, and families downwind of test sites.

This powerful and persuasive book reminds us how we have--so far--prevented nuclear war by deterrence, diplomacy, and luck. It is for the moment a success story, and a warning.




Contributor Bio:Else, Jon
Jon Else is a documentary filmmaker and Professor Emeritus at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. A MacArthur Fellow, two-time Oscar nominee, and five-time Emmy winner, he produced and directed the first ever film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Day After Trinity, and was series producer and cinematographer for Henry Hampton's Eyes on the Prize.