Review: A Short History of Nuclear Folly by Rudolph Herzog

Synopsis:
In the spirit of Dr. Strangelove and The Atomic Café, a blackly sardonic people’s history of atomic blunders and near-misses revealing the hushed-up and forgotten episodes in which the great powers gambled with catastrophe. Rudolph Herzog, the acclaimed author of Dead Funny, presents a devastating account of history’s most irresponsible uses of nuclear technology. From the rarely discussed nightmare of “Broken Arrows” (40 nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War) to “Operation Plowshare” (a proposal to use nuclear bombs for large engineering projects, such as a the construction of a second Panama Canal using 300 H-Bombs) . . . Herzog focuses in on long-forgotten nuclear projects that nearly led to disaster.

Translated by Jefferson Chase.

"The problem, both in the West and behind the Iron Curtain, was a lack of imagination. No one was able to picture the worst-case scenario."

That was fun. Slightly preachy, but it comes with the territory of stating the obvious about dire things that threaten life on earth. Also, the author—or translator—likes to use the word ironically quite a lot which makes things a lot less ironic. This could have been an intentional choice considering the subject matter.

Herzog starts with a short personal history and an explanation. This book isn’t about the most well known nuclear events in our history—Hiroshima and Nagasaki are mentioned in passing only—but about the lesser known chain(s) of events that led humanity to where we are now.

He talks about German scientists who were high currency in the nuclear game between superpowers before and after World War II. He talks about centrifuges, disasters and cleanups, the myth of tactical nuclear weapons, one man’s obsession, and nuclear tests in Australia as well as in Alaska. He talks about inhumane tests done in the name of medical science. The evolution of nuclear power and lost nuclear warheads are mentioned as well.

But what I found most fascinating weren’t the obvious problems with nuclear power—there’s waste, lots of it, and its half-life is 80 million years—or the ethical questions that come with it, nor was I particularly enthusiastic to read about the doomsday machines. No, it was the pacemakers.

Nuclear powered pacemakers. No need for battery changes!

Tiny problem is what happens after you’re dead. How do the authorities keep track of those plutonium batteries and do they end up in cemeteries or perhaps burning the back of an unfortunate orderly carrying a bin bag to trash. Oh, wait, that was the other interesting story. What happens when a company, a hospital acts responsibly but the government authorities do not? Four people die and hundreds suffer from radiation poisoning. And the death toll is relatively low thanks to an enterprising physicist.

I am somewhat familiar with the subject but people who hated sciences in school shouldn’t be afraid to read this book. There are a very few technical details and those that remain in the book are only there to further illustrate the historical context of each nuclear folly.

Because this book is more about the history and human stupidity when it comes to taking responsibility for scientific breakthroughs and how they're applied. This book is about the dangers of letting military prioritise between human lives, nature, and fleeting glory in battle. Or worse than that, not even a victory in an actual battle, just a show of strength.

To learn from your mistakes or the mistakes of others, you must first study history.

Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Cover of A Short History of Nearly Everything

Hardcover: 560 pages
Publisher: Broadway; 1 edition (May 6, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0767908171

genre: non-fiction, popular science 

Synopsis:

A Short History of Nearly Everything tries to present the history of our material world and life from primordial nothingness before the Big Bang to this very moment. A really daunting task but also a very exciting one. The author uses hundred of available sources covering roughly the same material as every science book, summarizing not only what we know, but also how we know it and how long we’ve been known it. The organization of the book is partly chronological, partly thematic - each chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as "The Size of the Earth" and "Life Itself." The latter half of the book deals primarily with the life sciences - biology, botany, ecology, zoology, oceanography, organic chemistry etc.

What I liked:

The book, although quite bulky, is very readable, you can almost forget you are reading about science and other heavy topics. As it was written by Tim Flannery in “The Times Literary Supplement”: "It represents a wonderful education, and all schools would be better places if it were the core science reader on the curriculum.” I might only add that this position can be treated as a kind of litmus paper - if you, after reading it, still say that you don’t want to have anything in common with any science you might be right after all (and the same can be true if this book is read by your kids).

For me the best part of the book was that it relates how little we actually do know about our world, its history, atomic structure, and really practically every scientific field. After reading it you will think differently about the challenges before an average scientist. "The facts we know tell us how much we don't know" – such a saying can summarize our knowledge pretty well.

What I didn’t like:

As usually with such ambitious undertakings the devil is in the details. I am not a scientist myself but I do like checking this and that independently. Let me just say the author not always presents the facts correctly. For example he makes several glaring errors in his discussion of physics, suggesting that particles with "spin" are actually spinning about an axis (which they are not) and presents entanglement as a violation of relativity (which it is not). These two were suggested to me by my physicist friend after just a superficial skimming of the text. Further on the author implies that the Hawaiian islands are part of the mid oceanic ridge system (p226) when clearly they are not - the archipelago is physiographically and ethnologically part of the Polynesian subregion of Oceania.. What a pity no trained scientist was hired to edit this book – after all the author interviewed some of them so he could have asked them to have a look at this or that.

In my humble opinion Bryson wastes far too much ink relating strange facts picked up in the course of his research, from William Buckland's dining habits to Gideon Mantell's twisted spine. They might enliven the narration at first but after a while you get tired of them and you start asking yourself what this book is really about.

Finally Bryson often just quotes results and conclusions without further explanation. Generally the text is permeated by a very conservative, and often, contradictory bias – you can easily say which theories/beliefs appeal to the author and which are written off by him as wacky. I suppose if you deal with science you should be a tad more objective yourself.

The final verdict:

The book, despite its flaws, is still a worthwhile read, particularly suited for average, non-scientific people (which were, in fact, its main target audience). However more incisive readers or those of a higher technical level might be disappointed.