Nuclear Minds

How researchers understood the atomic bomb’s effects on the human psyche before the recognition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In 1945, researchers on a mission to Hiroshima with the United States Strategic Bombing Survey canvassed survivors of the nuclear attack. This marked the beginning of global efforts—by psychiatrists, psychologists, and other social scientists—to tackle the complex ways in which human minds were affected by the advent of the nuclear age. A trans-Pacific research network emerged that produced massive amounts of data about the dropping of the bomb and subsequent nuclear tests in and around the Pacific rim. Ran Zwigenberg traces these efforts and the ways they were interpreted differently across communities of researchers and victims. He explores how the bomb’s psychological impact on survivors was understood before we had the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder. In fact, psychological and psychiatric research on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rarely referred to trauma or similar categories. Instead, institutional and political constraints—most notably the psychological sciences’ entanglement with Cold War science—led researchers to concentrate on short-term damage and somatic reactions or even, in some cases, on denial of victims’ suffering. As a result, very few doctors tried to ameliorate suffering. But, Zwigenberg argues, it was not only that doctors “failed” to issue the right diagnosis; the victims’ experiences also did not necessarily conform to our contemporary expectations. As he shows, the category of trauma should not be used uncritically in a non-Western context. Consequently, this book sets out, first, to understand the historical, cultural, and scientific constraints in which researchers and victims were acting and, second, to explore how suffering was understood in different cultural contexts before PTSD was a category of analysis.

An important investigation of the sociocultural fallout of America's work on the atomic bomb In The Nuclear Borderlands, Joseph Masco offers an in-depth look at the long-term consequences of the Manhattan Project. Masco examines how diverse groups in and around Los Alamos, New Mexico understood and responded to the U.S. nuclear weapons project in the post–Cold War period. He shows that the American focus on potential nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War obscured the broader effects of the nuclear complex on society, and that the atomic bomb produced a new cognitive orientation toward daily life, reconfiguring concepts of time, nature, race, and citizenship. This updated edition includes a brand-new preface by the author discussing current developments in nuclear politics and the scientific impact of the nuclear age on the present epoch of a human-altered climate.

Ernest Rutherford is probably best known for establishing the nuclear model of the atom in 1911. In addition, he was also the first person to break up the nucleus of an atom. As a result, Rutherford is widely recognized today as the father of nuclear science. From his humble beginnings in rural New Zealand, Ernest Rutherford went on to travel the world, becoming a pioneering scientist, an influential statesman, and an important teacher and mentor to many other great scientists. In Ernest Rutherford: Father of Nuclear Science, author Naomi Pasachoff examines the life and work of this groundbreaking scientist. Book jacket.

Some of the unfunded opportunities (UFOs), like the TR3B or TR6, are already flying; with this in mind, it may appear that this book is published too late. However, this is not the case. Both extraterrestrials and humans have developed craft of similar a "planform". Officials and the media continuously feed the masses incorrect information. Drive technology of the honestly endeavoring "human" is outdated. It seems to have been copied from some ancient Indian scriptures. Indeed, electrostatic, electromagnetic and rotating plasma drives deliver fermionic power, but they are far from allowing humanity to harness the power of a hyperspace jump. In 2017, NASA ensured us that "for the near future, [a] warp drive remains a dream". As a matter of fact, both human and extraterrestrial humanoids have hypothesized the use anti-gravity, warping and time travelling vehicles, even what they call "living vessels". However, both have no theory, no theoretical foundations for nuclear time travel technology. This book delivers a few necessary basics concerning the possible future where this nuclear time travel could potentially become a reality.

Dozens of states have long been capable of acquiring nuclear weapons, yet only a few have actually done so. Jacques E. C. Hymans finds that the key to this surprising historical pattern lies not in externally imposed constraints, but rather in state leaders' conceptions of the national identity. Synthesizing a wide range of scholarship from the humanities and social sciences to experimental psychology and neuroscience, Hymans builds a rigorous model of decisionmaking that links identity to emotions and ultimately to nuclear policy choices. Exhaustively researched case studies of France, India, Argentina, and Australia - two that got the bomb and two that abstained - demonstrate the value of this model while debunking common myths. This book will be invaluable to policymakers and concerned citizens who are frustrated with the frequent misjudgments of states' nuclear ambitions, and to scholars who seek a better understanding of how leaders make big foreign policy decisions.

What must the mind of a defense policymaker be like? Can nuclear Holocaust be rationalized? Can reality be subverted by patriotism or competition? Can an intelligent person think the unthinkable as a viable possibility? This investigation into the psychology of defense planners and cabinet members is interesting and frightening. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Winner of the American Book Award A classic of the Black Arts Movement brought back to life in a refreshed edition “A lion in literature’s forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly.”—Maya Angelou Originally published in 1984, this collection of prose, prose poems, and lyric verses is as fresh and radical today as it was then. Sonia Sanchez, the premiere poet of the Black Arts Movement, shows the “razor blades” in clenched in her teeth in these powerful pieces.

Since the first atomic weapon was detonated in 1945, Canadians have debated not only the role of nuclear power in their uranium-rich land but also their country’s role in a nuclear world. Should Canada belong to international alliances that depend on the threat of nuclear weapons for their own security? Should Canadian-produced nuclear technologies be exported? What about the impact of atomic research on local communities and the environment? This incisive nuclear history engages with much larger debates about national identity, Canadian foreign policy contradictions during the Cold War, and Canada’s global standing to investigate these critical questions.