Many of the projects described here have been documented elsewhere, but most other sources of information have little to say about safety, science, or history. Using this book as a starting point could lead one to develop a truly interesting ballistic arsenal indeed!!

   Just from skimming through it you can tell that a lot of thought and precaution went into it's construction. Parents may be scared seeing a book like this in the hands of their child, but don't be frightened. Most of the projects in here are pretty innocuous and safety is paramount. The book and author STRESS proper precautions and advise safety gear for any dangerous experiments. If you have a kid who has been playing with fire, been showing an interest in explosives or such, then buy them this book and do these projects with them! It will give kids a productive, educational and supervised outlet for these curiosities and fascinations and will give you a chance to teach them a bit about physics and further bond with them. Some young pyros grow into arsonists, others grow into firemen and physicists... you make the choice! Instead of punishing them and trying to curb their interest in such things, channel this energy into something positive.

   Before we had homeland security to worry about, this might have been a good source book for a science fair. If you're in touch with your inner Goddard, von Braun, or just love the idea of a tennis ball mortar ... then this is the book for you!

169 pages
Backyard Ballistics: $18.00

159 pages
Woosh Boom Splat: $18.00

   The basic details of this episode are well known, but the story has only now received the detailed historical analysis it deserves. In Radium Girls Claudia Clark focuses on the experiences of the painters. She integrates startling anecdotes with sophisticated analyses to explore the politics of occupational disease. For example, Clark describes the excitement of the women who worked on these "sensational" products: told that radium would "put a glow in [their] cheeks," they painted their clothing, fingernails, and even their teeth, "for a smile that glowed in the dark." How could this have happened? As Clark reminds us, these women worked at a time before the bombing of Hiroshima, when radiation was seen as the key to the future. Though some researchers had documented the dangers of radium, it was hailed as a panacea and sold for a variety of medicinal purposes. The deposition of radium in workers' bones was even seen as beneficial: their bodies were bathed in the healing power of radiation.

   Clark traces how this excitement turned into fear and "furious frustration." When workers began to suffer from anemia, fractures, and necrosis of the jaw, some of them, as well as their physicians and dentists, suggested that there was a connection to the radium paint. The watch-dial companies rejected these claims. Government regulators concluded that the existing evidence did not warrant further investigation. Recognition of radium poisoning took years of effort by the women and workers' advocates. This narrative is rich in tragedy and scandal: researchers accepted companies' requests that they not release their damning data; a dentist offered his testimony to the highest bidder. Although settlements did provide some financial compensation, the companies neither admitted guilt nor submitted to formal regulation. Although the government was slow to intervene on behalf of the dial painters, it took rapid action to prevent any injuries from radium medications; it "acted with far greater alacrity to help consumers than to assist workers."

   The most valuable contribution of Radium Girls lies in its ability to explode myths about the nature of scientific discovery. As Clark shows, the recognition of radium poisoning was not an event, a flash of medical insight. Instead, it was a political process, negotiated by labor, management, government, and medicine. Clark also explores a host of other important issues, providing helpful histories of industrial disease, workers' compensation, women's reform movements, and radiation medicine.

Overall, Radium Girls is an important book for anyone interested in the history of radiation. It captures the often neglected experiences and contributions of the painters. Most important, it powerfully reminds us that it is not enough to take precautions only against known toxins. Instead, we must struggle to anticipate new risks in our changing industrial and social environments.

298 pages
Radium Girls: $20.00

   Peter Kuran has been fascinated with the Atomic Bomb and its photography. As he writes: "It wasn't until 1945 that the sciences of photography would cross paths with the sciences of the atom. For the next 17 years, still and motion picture photography would combine with atomic physics to create imagery the world may never witness again first hand."

   In 1995 Kuran produced and directed "Trinity and Beyond (The Atomic Bomb Movie)," a documentary of the history of nuclear weapons development and testing. During his work on that documentary, he met many of the photographers, and in 1999 he directed another documentary "The Atomic Filmmakers: Behind the Scenes". He has now written this book containing documents and photographs relating to the history of US atomic weapons tests between 1945 and 1962. He also presents information about the photographers and their techniques and equipment.

   The book contains amazing photographs from some of the 300 atmospheric tests conducted by the US during that period. Kuran writes that there were relatively few images and film clips of Trinity, the first test explosion, and the combat use of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The government was intent on perfecting nuclear bombs, and "photography was the best way of being able to capture data".

   For the 21-kiloton, Crossroads Baker detonation near Bikini Atoll on July 24, 1946, special 100-foot towers were erected on the island for photographers to get unobstructed views. One black-and-white image captured on an 8-by-10-inch negative shows a ship standing on end after the device, positioned 95 feet beneath seawater, erupted in a plume that raised 1 million tons of water in a column 300 yards wide. A cloud could be seen rising 6,000 feet up.

   A year later, atomic bomb photography was assigned to the Air Force's 4881st Motion Picture Squadron. The squadron, which later was redesignated as the 1352nd Photographic Squadron, operated out of a secret production facility in Hollywood, California, known as Lookout Mountain Studios. The squadron photographed tests in the South Pacific, and at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier devised ultra-high-speed strobe techniques for producing split-second images of nuclear fireballs erupting, which allowed scientists to tailor their design of bombs.

   I cannot adequately describe these photographs. You really have to see them to understand their visual impact. But it is easy to describe the unsettling familiarity people displayed while watching and photographing these tests. Many of the photographs are visual proof; here George Yoshitake puts the casual approach into words:

   "One afternoon I was at Lookout Mountain right here in Hollywood, and I got a call from a Woody Mark. He said `George, I need you out here tomorrow for a special test.' I got there that night and he said, `Tomorrow morning you're going to go out with five other guys and you're going to be standing at ground zero.' I said, `Ground zero?' He said. `Yeah, but the bomb's gonna go off 10,000 feet above you.' I said, `Well, what kind of protective gear am I going to have?' He said `None.'

   "I remember I had a baseball hat, so I wore that just in case. He gave me a still camera, and two motion picture cameras. These were 35mm Eyemos. I set up the two Eyemos, and had little trip wires that I could trip with my foot starting about 5 seconds before the blast. And the still camera, I also had a trip wire so that I could trip it. I could get one exposure only. The five other guys were scientists and they volunteered to be there. I wasn't a volunteer. I didn't find out until I got there."

These are extraordinary images for the reader and a great gift for anyone interested in the topic.

512 pages

The Chemistry of Powder & Explosives: $35.00

209 pages

The Radioactive Boy Scout: $25.00

     The experiments were covered up for 40 years: When they became public, the government apologized but not a single doctor or hospital was publicly blamed. The plutonium injections ended after 27 months, having achieved little.

     But other experiments, for the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), continued into the 1970s. In Nashville, scientists at Vanderbilt University gave pregnant women radioactive cocktails. Prisoners in Oregon and Washington had their testicles radiated with neutrons. At the University of Cincinnati, nearly 200 patients were irradiated over a 15-year period. In Massachusetts, 74 boys at a Dickensian state school for unwanted or homeless boys were fed oatmeal laced with radioactive iron or calcium. The University of Chicago, one of the three sites for the plutonium injections, also fed solutions of strontium and cesium to 102 subjects with the assistance of Argonne National Laboratory. Again, no one told the victims what was going on, nor did anyone ask their consent.

     This is a horrifying story and it is told with quiet rage by Eileen Welsome, a reporter for the Albuquerque Tribune  who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her reporting on the plutonium experiments. News of these and other experiments had leaked out earlier, but they received little public attention. Welsome's achievement was to pierce the closed files and classified records that were part of the medical cover-up of the experiments. It is not possible to read The Plutonium Files  without mounting fury, as Welsome tells of the violation of human bodies and spirits by scientists in whom this nation places its trust. Her book is a powerful indictment of an important part of the Manhattan Project and a warning of the evil that supposedly high-minded people can do when convinced of their own superiority and devoted to a goal that blinds them to simple humanity.

     There is documentary evidence that Robert Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists approved the experiments (although Welsome found no signs that Gen. Leslie Groves, who told Congress in 1945 that radiation sickness is "a pleasant way to die," ever knew about them.)

     The government covered up the plutonium experiments until 1993 when then-Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, spurred by Welsome's stories, reversed this policy. President Bill Clinton then ordered federal agencies to open any records dealing with the plutonium experiments or any other human radiation experiments. The resulting investigation, undertaken by the president's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, turned up much of the information on other experiments that is included in this book.

     So was the very first plutonium recipient, a construction worker named Ebb Cade, who was injured in a traffic accident on his way to work at Oak Ridge and ended up in the army hospital there. Scientists had decided to begin the plutonium experiments and Cade--there is no other way to put it--happened to be handy. A month after Cade was injected in 1945, Wright Langham, a Los Alamos chemist who was a driving force behind the experiments, told a meeting of Manhattan Project doctors in Chicago that "the subject was an elderly male whose age and general health was such that there is little or no possibility that the injection can have any effect on the normal course of his life." Cade, in fact, was 55 and, apart from partial blindness caused by a cataract, reasonably healthy. He died eight years later of a heart attack.

     The third subject, a house painter named Albert Stevens, was chosen to be injected at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco because he had terminal cancer. But the diagnosis was wrong and Stevens lived another 21 years. For the next two decades, scientists collected Stevens's urine and stool samples to check the amount of plutonium in his system. He knew he was part of an experiment, but assumed it was part of his treatment for his arrested cancer. Incredibly, Stevens lived out his life unaware that he did not have cancer and had never had it.

     Welsome says that even the Rochester scientists called their program "a production line." Unknowing patients were given an average of five micrograms of plutonium, which was five times the safe limit set by Manhattan Project scientists. Eleven patients were injected at Rochester and there probably would have been more had it not been for inconveniences like Christmas. "No one seems to want to be in the hospital on that particular day," Bassett groused. "I will do what I can, however, to keep the production line going."

     The plundering of body parts of radiation victims reached ghoulish proportions. Cecil Kelley, who was killed in an accident at Los Alamos, was not so much buried as distributed. Bits of his corpse went to the army, to Oak Ridge, and to other researchers around the nation. His brain was shipped out in a wide-mouthed mayonnaise jar. What was left was eventually given a military burial by the government, which also promised to pay for his children's college education. The promise was never kept.

     The committee convened by President Clinton eventually issued a controversial 1995 report that blamed everyone--and, hence, no one. It found that bad things were done, but refused to condemn those who did them. "Wrongs were committed," it said, "by very decent people who were in a position to know that a specific aspect of their interactions with others should be improved."

     In a sense, as Welsome notes, the verdict on the plutonium experiments was handed down 2,500 years ago by Hippocrates--"I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked"--and 52 years ago by James McHaney, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials: "It is the most fundamental tenet of medical ethics and human decency that the subjects volunteer for the experiment after being informed of its nature and hazards. This is the clear dividing line between the criminal and what may be non-criminal. If the experimental subjects cannot be said to have volunteered, then the inquiry need proceed no further."

592 pages

The Plutonium Files: $25.00