read of accidents
Does this have a lot of important details?
... I'm not specifically an anti-nuke person, I believe that they were the only way in the cold war of avoiding an unaffordable conventional arms race - but you can't match a totalitarian regime like the soviets were in conventional arms without shifting to a total-war economy, so the first-strike principle made sense. But wow - to read the number of accidents that have happened, and the number of times we've got away by sheer chance from having these weapons detonate on our own territory or on that of friendly nations is frightening. And that's with the resources of a first world country, let alone what would happen in some of the third world places that have them. This stuff is really scary, and the lies and cover ups from our own military are absolutely disgraceful, particularly when it came to civilian-environmental contamination, as well as the way they treated people who helped out in the main Damascus incident. Everyone should be aware of the downsides and dangers of even routine handling of these things, especially the nations that see their possession as ways to get seats at &#34;The big boys table&#34; when it comes to international negotiations. The technical descriptions are well detailed, along with the political and historical decisions taken at different times and why. I heard about this book on NPR and thoroughly enjoyed it. I still think on the balance it's useful to have a few of them around, but under much more careful supervision than our armed forces have displayed in the past. 