Thursday, January 1, 2015

Happy NUKE Year!

The New Year starts with fireworks, therefore around this time I always find myself looking again at the most epic ones ever made.
Here area few of my faves:









The above are basically music videos with awesome visuals (put on full screen!), but of course there are also documentaries on this most fascinating subject. I rewatched this one:

Nukes in Space was also made by Peter Kuran and narrated by William Shatner (AKA "Captain Kirk" of the USS Enterprise), just as the first one of the series, Trinity and Beyond.

Besides these amazing documentaries I also highly recommend the books Nuclear Weapons and Plutonium by Jeremy Bernstein. I personally prefer these two over The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, although the latter one has a better rating on Amazon and is certainly a classic, and it does deserve to be, it's brilliantly written and goes into much detail. But that's also the reason why it's quite a chore to read it from cover to cover - which I did, but I think it took me months - it's more than 800 pages and also goes heavily into politics which I'm not particularly interested in, and I read other stuff in between because due to its size this epic volume isn't one you'd want to take along when traveling. The two books by Jeremy Bernstein, mentioned above, are much more to the point and easier to read, especially if you're more interested in the actual science and facts about these ingenious and fascinating weapons.

Of course, there is also lots of informative material on the subject found online, for instance the Nuclear Weapon Archive, even if it doesn't seem to have been updated in a long time.
And sometimes you can even stumble upon new interesting little facts formerly unheard of, such as the "red mercury" hoax - ?! I'll have to read that article now and perhaps dig up more.

Anything else? Oh yes... HAPPY NUKE YEAR!!! :D