Customer Reviews

The Effects of Thermonuclear Weapons

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The first impression I had when I received this book from Amazon was that it had been bound by 5-year old child. The pages are poor quality paper from a photocopier that have been glued (lots of glue) to a thick cloth cover which accounts for about half of the book's thickness. As for content, any meaningful information (equations and figures) has been copied, in some cases photocopied from other books. There is no depth whatsoever to this book. I expected something approaching the level of Samuel Glasstone's "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons" and was extremely dissappointed.

I was truly stunned when I was given a copy of this book. My initial impression was the previous owner had dropped it in the toilet or spilt an entire pot of coffee over it and left it soaking overnight. It was in fact hand bound, presumably by the author - possibly as part of a class project, and consequently the book flops open wherever you put it. It is impossible to keep it closed. The text is devoid of any useful information and merely contains copies of equations with no explanation of their origin. The various typefaces used throughout the 50 pages or so suggest they were probably lifted from other texts. I would find it hard to recommend to anyone unless they had a passing interest in bookbinding

I should have checked the author of that 5-star rating before using it to make my decision on this book. Only the author could have had such nice things to say... There is a little original material here, but it would be a stretch to pay $5.00 for it, much less $35. This is a small book with very little original material. At $35 it is a big rip off. If this binding is 'improved' I can't imagine how it used to be! It looks like the author took a copy of "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons," a freshman-level college physics text, a pair of scissors, a few photos of bomb explosions, and a xerox machine and made a collage of other people's work, bound it poorly and decided to charge $35 a copy. Almost every diagram (at least every useful one) in there is taken directly from "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons." Although out of print, wait until a good value comes up from Amazon's used book service. It is a far better reference than this book. The formulas are poorly explained and the presentation is just terrible. There are numerous misspellings, and you can tell the diagrams were not typeset in any professional way but just xeroxed from "Effects"; then a reference number was taped to it and someone put it all in a copy machine, sometimes a little crooked. Plus, in spite of a 2001 'revision' the data on nuclear arsenals dates from back in the early 90's or even the late 80's. Overall, this is just a bad book. Unless you can find it used, PLEASE don't make the mistake I did and pay full price. If submitted as a high school research paper this 'work' would have been given a 'D' at best at most places. It certainly does not deserve to be put alongside the many useful references out there. Please don't be mislead by the author's review of this book. The thick cover would make a nice coaster, but as a reference on nuclear weapons, it is shameful that Mr. Green would publish this as an original work.

The 5th edition of THE EFFECTS OF THERMONUCLEAR WEAPONS contains fireball and blastwave formula derivations and nuclear effects software in addition to a review of characteristics of actual nuclear weapons stockpiled by the USA and the USSR at the time of the SALT talks. It also includes nuclear effects software and software for computing the destruction an asteroid or a comet, in addition to computing detailed asteroid impact effects and the megatonages used for asteroid orbit deviation applications. The new nuclear effects software includes the usual fireball and blastwave effects, including the 5 psi radius and the thousand-suns radius. It also computes underground and underwater effects of nuclear explosions, including crater size, the Richter scale of a nuclear explosion, and many other useful measures. Small hardback with software on diskette.

The 5th edition of THE EFFECTS OF THERMONUCLEAR WEAPONS by James A. Green is now sewn in signatures to improve the binding, and the plates have been retouched based on customer feedback. I feel that this volume is the best short book on the topic available in English, containing many valuable charts and diagrams prepared by government experts and offered to the public in declassified documents formerly available in the 1970s, in addition to charts and diagrams prepared by the author. The text is mathematical, and derives formulae for the fireball and blastwave effects that are not explained adequately elsewhere. The WINDOWS software provided with the volume calculates the nuclear effects extensively based on official government formulae, including airburst effects, surface burst effects, and also underwater and underground effects, including cratering and cavern creation, tidal wave effects, and so on. This new edition includes more information on fallout and radiation effects useful for civil defense purposes in response to customer requests. In addition, software is provided that covers the asteroid and comet destruction or path-deviation problems. The same software computes the effects of asteroid impacts on the Earth, and derives the megatonages and minimum-throw-weight of H-bombs required to destroy these objects or deviate their paths, providing results in terms space-shuttle cargo loads in addition to raw poundages of reactants. Students computing how to save the Earth with these tools from asteroid extinction events will find quite a trove of information on the problem in the published source code in C/C++, which is available for the asteroid destruction problem on diskette for the benefit of other scholars. Chapters include frontispiece photographs from the remarkable Bikini Atoll Test B mushroom cloud, which is full of striking ghostly images. The book includes references to important government documents on the problem long out of print, in addition to a selection of works by authors in the public domain.

i study the effects of nuclear weapons in ai