The story of the postwar superpower arms race, climaxing during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade. Drawing on a wealth of new documentation, Rhodes reveals how the Reagan administration's unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s led Soviet leader Andropov to conclude that Reagan must be preparing for a nuclear war. In 1983, when NATO staged a large series of field exercises, the Soviets came very close to launching a defensive first strike. Then Reagan...

New York Times bestselling author Dale Brown-"the best military writer in the country" (Clive Cussler)-is back with Starfire, a masterful military thriller that explores a future all too possible and all too close: the weaponization of space. With the death of his heroic father, bomber and space warfare veteran Patrick McLanahan, Bradley McLanahan must now fly solo, leading a team of young engineers designing Starfire, the world's first orbiting solar...

"A masterful achievement...[Carroll's] prose is elegant, his viewpoint bold." -Howard Zinn, author of The People's History of the United States "One cannot understand the impact of the Pentagon on US foreign policy. . . without reading James Carroll's House of War." -Lawrence Korb, former Undersecretary of Defence under Ronald Reagan From the National Book Award–winning author of An American Requiem and Constantine's Sword comes a sweeping yet...

With the use of newly opened archives, "Red Cloud at Dawn" focuses on the extraordinary story of First Lightning--the first Soviet test bomb detonated in 1949--to provide a fresh understanding of the origins of the nuclear arms race, as well as the all-too-urgent problem of proliferation.

Recounts the scientific discoveries that enabled atom splitting, the military intelligence operations that occurred in rival countries, and the work of brilliant scientists hidden at Los Alamos.