Showing titles in Weapons & Warfare

A Times History Book of the Year 2022 From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings ‘the heart-stopping story of the missile crisis’ Daily Telegraph The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the most perilous event in history, when mankind faced a looming nuclear collision between the United States...

Brought to you by Penguin. The Sunday Times bestselling edge-of-your-seat exploration of what would happen in the event of nuclear war, perfect for readers of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. *Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2024*...

A comprehensive history of Britain's greatest bomber plane. The Spitfire and the Lancaster were the two RAF weapons of victory in the Second World War, but the glamour of the fighter has tended to overshadow the performance of the heavy bomber. Yet without the Lancaster, Britain would never have been able to take the fight to the German homeland. Highlights the scale of the bomber's achievements, including the famous Dambusters attacks. With its vast bomb bay, ease of handling and surprising speed, the mighty Lancaster transformed the effectiveness of the Bomber Command. 

The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 changed the nature of war forever. The awesome power of the atomic blast and its deadly fallout meant that nowhere was safe: every town, village, street and home in Britain fell under the nuclear shadow, and the threat of annihilation coloured every aspect of ordinary life for the next forty years. As the media reported on the inevitability of approaching conflict with the Soviet Union, the British people were told to prepare for the coming apocalypse.

A warning to humankind from one of the world’s greatest physicists 'What drives these pages is the guilty conscience of my profession, theoretical physics. My sole aim is to help avert what seems to me to be the unintended, yet scarcely avoidable, end point of the current politics of the...

Brought to you by Penguin. A sweeping, original history of the Cold War, from an acclaimed historian of the USSR Why did the Cold War erupt so soon after the Second World War? How did it escalate so rapidly, spanning five continents over six decades? And what led to the spectacular collapse of...

The gripping saga of the plane that carried Britain through the Second World War. In June 1940, the German Army had brought the rest of Europe to its knees. 'Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life...

"The one book you must read if you have any hope of understanding what our fine American soldiers are up against in Afghanistan.” —Former Congressman Charlie Wilson From the author of the award-winning THE LAST SEASON, the untold story of the U.S. Army Special Forces team that conquered the...

Brought to you by Penguin. The remarkable story of the Real 'Dad's Army', from the bestselling historian of The Secret Life of Bletchley Park With the threat of invasion from Hitler's forces looming large in 1940, men of all ages and backgrounds assembled under the banner of the Home Guard. A...

Brought to you by Penguin. The definitive new history of the Cuban Missile Crisis from the author of Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize For more than four weeks in the autumn of 1962 the world teetered. The consequences of a misplaced step during the Cuban...

Discover the definitive history of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, in this Pulitzer Prize finalist from the author of the New York Times bestseller Area 51. No one has ever written the history of the Defense Department's most secret, most powerful, and most controversial...

'Really outstanding' Jonathan Dimbleby 'Extraordinary and utterly absorbing' Patrick Bishop 'Wonderful material' Saul David 'Profoundly thought-provoking' James Holland 'Impeccably researched' Spectator At 8:15 a.m. on August 6th, 1945, the Japanese port city of Hiroshima was struck by the...

The rapid evolution of radio and radar systems for military use during WWII, and devices to counter them, led to a technological battle that neither the Axis nor the Allied powers could afford to lose. The result was a continual series of thrusts, parries, and counter-thrusts, as first one side then the other sought to wrest the initiative in the struggle to control the ether.

In a world divided by the ideological struggles of the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, more than one-fifth of the people on the planet paused to watch the live transmission of the Apollo 11 mission. To watch as humanity took a giant leap forward. A companion book to the...

The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg's hair-raising insider's account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization, whose legacy - and renewal under the Obama administration - threatens the very survival of humanity. It is scarcely possible to estimate the true dangers of our present nuclear policies without penetrating the secret realities of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, when Ellsberg had high-level access to them.

The first of two ground-breaking volumes on the Waterloo campaign, this audiobook is based upon a detailed analysis of sources old and new in four languages. It highlights the political stresses between the Allies, the problems of feeding and paying for the Allied forces assembling in Belgium during the undeclared war and how a strategy was thrashed out. It studies the neglected topic of how the Allies beyond the Rhine hampered the plans of Blücher and Wellington, thus allowing Napoleon to snatch the initiative from them.

At 9:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, an American bomber pierced the skies over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The single bomb it dropped unleashed an atomic hurricane that toppled homes, vaporized birds in flight, and carbonized humans. Three days later, a second bomb flattened the port city of...

Part One Winston Churchill's superlative account of the prelude to and events of the First World War is a defining work of 20th-century history. With dramatic narrative power Churchill reconstructs the action on the Western and Eastern Fronts, the wars at sea and in the air and the advent of tanks and U-boats.

Brought to you by Penguin. **WINNER of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2024** Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows. By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair...

""I thought I knew the story but learned much that I didn’t know. Outstanding!""— Richard Rhodes “This is historical research at its best.” — Dan Carlin President Truman’s choice to drop the atomic bomb is the most debated decision in the 20th Century. But what if Truman’s actual...