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A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld
Nation Books
June 2006
300 pages ISBN: 1560258497 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
How did a fluke experiment in 1998, involving a used dental
X-ray machine and a dubious sample of radioactive material,
become the Pentagon's pet weapons project? It had been
rejected by one of the Pentagon's most important advisory
groups, but the Pentagon found an eccentric scientist who
believed that a super "isomer" bomb could be built, and
deliver the punch of a two-kiloton nuke packaged in a hand
grenade. Ideologues at the Pentagon claimed that the
Russians were in the process of building one of their own,
and that the weapon was essential to the Pentagon's arsenal. Imaginary Weapons tells the story of the battle that ensued,
pitting the nation's leading nuclear physicists against the
Pentagon's top brass, and the military against nuclear arms
control advocates, as funds and experiments for the "isomer
weapon" miraculously reappeared even after the project had
been shelved numerous times, even by Congress. This book also illuminates the dangerous trend that the Bush
administration continues to follow of putting politics
before science. The bomb is imaginary, and the only
explosion produced by the "isomer weapon" will leave a hole
in the nation's budget and a fallout of the nation's best
and brightest scientists.
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