Kategoria BISAC: History >> Military - Weapons

A riveting, minute-by-minute account of the momentous event that changed our world forever

On a quiet Monday morning in August 1945, a five-ton bomb--dubbed Little Boy by its creators--was dropped from an American plane onto the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On that day, a firestorm of previously unimagined power was unleashed on a vibrant metropolis of 300,000 people, leaving one third of its population dead, its buildings and landmarks incinerated. It was the terrifying dawn of the Atomic Age, spawning decades of paranoia, mistrust, and a widespread and very real fear of the...

From the American entry into World War II until September 1943, U.S. submarines experienced an abnormally high number of torpedo failures. These failures resulted from three defects present in the primary torpedo of the day, the Mark XIV. These defects were a tendency to run deeper than the set depth, the frequent premature detonation of the Mark 6 magnetic influence exploder, and the failure of the contact exploder when hitting a target at the textbook ninety-degree angle. Ironically, despite using a completely independent design, the Germans experienced the same three defects. The...

Beginning with World War II, missiles transformed the art of war. For the first time, cities of warring nations were vulnerable to sudden, unannounced, long-distance destruction. At the same time, rockets made possible one of the great triumphs of the modern age--the exploration of space. Rockets and Missiles traces the history of the technology that led to both the great fear of global warfare, and the great excitement of the Space Age. Beginning with the origins of rocketry in medieval and early modern Asia, the volume focuses on rocketry in late-20th-century Western...

Guns have existed in various forms for hundreds of years, and few objects have had such an immense impact on the history of the world. But how did firearms develop? Why did the styles of guns change over the years? Firearms tells the life story of the gun, from the hand-held weapons of ancient humans, to the medieval guns of China that propelled objects by chemical reactions, to the modern assault rifle, the gun as the primary weapon in the modern army, and the gun as a tool for hunting. Not only does the book demonstrate how firearms developed--an evolution dependent upon years of...

Bombs are as old as hatred itself. But it was the twentieth century--one hundred years of incredible scientific progress and terrible war--that brought forth the Big One, the Bomb, humanity's most powerful and destructive invention. In The Bomb: A Life, Gerard DeGroot tells the story of this once unimaginable weapon that--at least since 8:16 a.m. on August 6, 1945--has haunted our dreams and threatened our existence.

The Bomb has killed hundreds of thousands outright, condemned many more to lingering deaths, and made vast tracts of land unfit for life. For decades it dominated...

The explosion of the industrial revolution and the rise of imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century served to dramatically increase the supply and demand for weapons on a global scale. No longer could arms manufacturers in industrialized nations subsist by supplying their own states' arsenals, causing them to seek markets beyond their own borders.

Challenging the traditional view of arms dealers as agents of their own countries, Jonathan Grant asserts that these firms pursued their own economic interests while convincing their homeland governments that weapons sales...

Based on exhaustive research in formerly classified documents, Paddock examines the U.S. Army's activities in psychological and...