Nuclear Books

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Atomic America, Todd Tucker.   Brilliantly uses the 1961 SL-1 accident as a foundation to tell the story of the competition between the armed services for nuclear programs. The Army with SL-1, Operation Iceworm with the reactor powered city beneath the ice in Greenland, the Davy Crockett jeep mounted nuclear missile and the well known barge reactors. The Air Force with the mind boggling nuclear jet which lifted a reactor from a pit in a runway with a chainfall and flew numerous times carrying the reactor but never started it. And the Navy with the S1W reactor that powered the first nuclear submarine.

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The Nuclear Express, Thomas Reed.  The story of how the countries that have nuclear weapons got them. US, USSR, UK, France, Israel, China, India, South Africa, Pakistan, North Korea. France struggled. Israel was ingeniously desperate. South Africa may have exploded a weapon in the deep South Atlantic in a typhoon to evade detection. China, snubbed by the USSR who promised them a bomb, started from scratch and chose the Uranium enrichment route rather than follow everyone else with the plutonium weapon. Pakistan and what became the "Khan Network".