Action for Disarmament: 10 Things You Can Do!
Kathleen Sullivan and Peter Lucas
UN Publications, 2014
In a world where weapons small and large remain a threat to humanity, the United Nations’ new book “Action for Disarmament: 10 Things You Can Do!” shows young people actionable steps they can take to personally lead the call for disarmament. The book presents a variety of resources for the reader to learn about history and modern uses of weapons: guns, bombs, nuclear and biological weapons. The reader is encouraged to use that knowledge to foster a dialogue with peers, the media and politicians. Suggestions are given for points of discussion as well as methods to tailor them to be concise and have impact. The action-driven format of the book makes it both an excellent primer on disarmament and also one on civic engagement.
African Americans Against the Bomb
Vincent Intondi
Stanford University Press, 2015
Well before Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out against nuclear weapons, African Americans were protesting the Bomb. Historians have generally ignored African Americans when studying the anti-nuclear movement, yet they were some of the first citizens to protest Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Now for the first time, African Americans Against the Bomb tells the compelling story of those black activists who fought for nuclear disarmament by connecting the nuclear issue with the fight for racial equality.
By expanding traditional research in the history of the nuclear disarmament movement to look at black liberals, clergy, artists, musicians, and civil rights leaders, Intondi reveals the links between the black freedom movement in America and issues of global peace. From Langston Hughes through Lorraine Hansberry to President Obama, African Americans Against the Bomb offers an eye-opening account of the continuous involvement of African Americans who recognized that the rise of nuclear weapons was a threat to the civil rights of all people.
Atomic Bomb – Voices From Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Mark Selden and Kyoko Iriye Selden (editors),
Routledge, 1989
Many accounts, personal and secondary, have been written by and about the victims of the atomic bombs, the best known being John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Following an essay which discusses (and indicts) the decisions to drop the bombs, the Seldens have assembled literary expressions, factual and fictional, written by those who experienced the world’s only nuclear warfare. The testimony appears in the form of “Novellas,” “Poetry,” a “Photo Essay,” “Citizens’ Memoirs,” “Pictures by Atomic Bomb Survivors” (not available for review), and “Children’s Voices.” As the editors assert, these voices ” . . . merit careful listening,” but their graphic descriptions of unimaginable horrors challenge both stomach and conscience. Recommended
Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy
Ray Acheson
Rowan & Littlefield, 2021
Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy offers a look inside the antinuclear movement and its recent successful campaign to ban the bomb. From scrappy organizing to winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 and achieving a landmark UN treaty banning nuclear weapons, this book narrates the journey of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and developments in feminist disarmament activism. Acheson explains the process through which diplomats, activists, and nuclear survivors worked together to elevate the horrific humanitarian and environmental impacts of nuclear weapons, develop new international law categorically prohibiting the bomb, challenge the nuclear orthodoxy, and strengthen norms for disarmament and peace. Told from the perspective of a queer feminist antimilitarist organizer who was involved from the start of the process through to the treaty’s adoption, the book utilizes interviews with dozens of participants, as well as critical theoretical perspectives about transnational advocacy networks, discourse change, and intersectional feminist action. It is meant to provide useful insights for anyone trying to make change amidst structures of power and politics.
Barefoot Gen, Vol. 1: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima 
Kenji Nakazawa
Last Gasp, 2004
The reissue of this classic manga’s first volume has impeccable timing. It recounts the bombing of Hiroshima from the perspective of a young boy, Gen, and his family. But the book’s themes (the physical and psychological damage ordinary people suffer from war’s realities) ring chillingly true today. Gen and his family have long been struggling without much food, money or medicine, but despite hardships, they try to maintain a semblance of normal life. The adults are exhausted and near despair; the children take air raids and starvation more or less in stride. Nakazawa, a Hiroshima survivor, effectively portrays the strain of living in this environment and shows how efforts to stay upbeat in dire circumstances sometimes manifest as manic, irrational humor. Vol. 2-10 also available.
Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade
Gabrielle Hecht
MIT Press, 2014
Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In 2003, after the infamous “yellow cake from Niger,” Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of uranium, a component of nuclear weapons. But did that admit Niger, or any of Africa’s other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states? Does uranium itself count as a nuclear thing? In this book, Gabrielle Hecht lucidly probes the question of what it means for something—a state, an object, an industry, a workplace—to be “nuclear.”
Hecht shows that questions about being nuclear—a state that she calls “nuclearity”—lie at the heart of today’s global nuclear order and the relationships between “developing nations” (often former colonies) and “nuclear powers” (often former colonizers). Hecht enters African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure. Could a mine be a nuclear workplace if (as in some South African mines) its radiation levels went undetected and unmeasured? With this book, Hecht is the first to put Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa. By doing so, she remakes our understanding of the nuclear age.
The Bomb
Howard Zinn
City Lights, 2010
“The late historian and activist Howard Zinn was familiar with bombs—he dropped them on people during World War II, flying as a bombardier in Europe. This is Zinn’s passionate and readable denunciation of bombs—not just the bomb, but all bombs. In the book’s two chapters—one on Hiroshima and one on Royan, France, where Zinn dropped napalm late in World War II—Zinn poses the crucial question: “What can we learn to free us from the thinking that leads us to stand by . . . while atrocities are committed in our name?” The Bomb is the kind of critical, angry, but hopeful history telling for which Howard Zinn is so deservedly well known.” —Bill Bigelow
Coming Back to Life: An Updated Guide to the Work that Re-Connects
Joanna R.Macy and Molly Young Brown
New Society Press, 2014 Revised Edition
Deepening global crises surround us. We are beset by climate change, fracking, tar sands extraction, GMOs, and mass extinctions of species, to say nothing of nuclear weapons proliferation and Fukushima, the worst nuclear disaster in history. Many of us fall prey to despair even as we feel called to respond to these threats to life on our planet. Authors Joanna Macy and Molly Brown address the anguish experienced by those who would confront the harsh realities of our time. In this fully updated edition of Coming Back to Life, they show how grief, anger and fear are healthy responses to threats to life, and when honored can free us from paralysis or panic, through the revolutionary practice of the Work that Reconnects. New chapters address engaging communities of color, children and teens in the Work. Youth Arts New York founder, Robert Croonquist acted as an advisor to the authors.
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner
Daniel Ellsberg
Bloomsbury, 2017
A treasure of finely woven secrets and insights lies in Daniel Ellsberg’s new memoir, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Their importance grows each day that the nuclear stand-offs on the Korean Peninsula, in South Asia and between the United States and Russia go unabated. People interested in international affairs who are of a certain age know who Daniel Ellsberg is, but the younger cohort of nuclear policy makers, scholars, and pundits grows every year, and will gain by knowing the riches Ellsberg offers.
The End of Imagination 
Arundhati Roy
Haymarket Books, 2016
The End of Imagination brings together five of Arundhati Roy’s acclaimed books of essays into one comprehensive volume for the first time and features a new introduction by the author.
This new collection begins with her pathbreaking book The Cost of Living published soon after she won the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things in which she forcefully condemned India’s nuclear tests and its construction of enormous dam projects that continue to displace countless people from their homes and communities. The End of Imagination also includes her nonfiction works Power Politics, War Talk, Public Power in the Age of Empire, and An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, which include her widely circulated and inspiring writings on the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the need to confront corporate power, and the hollowing out of democratic institutions globally.
The Fate of the Earth
Jonathan Schell
Stanford University Press, 2000
The book is a groundbreaking work that described the effects of nuclear war in such a way that “forces even the most reluctant person to confront the unthinkable: the destruction of humanity and possibly most life on Earth”. The book is often attributed with revitalizing the anti-nuclear movement in the United States. This book helped focus national attention in the early 1980s on the movement for a nuclear freeze. The Fate of the Earth painted a chilling picture of the planet in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, while The Abolition offered a proposal for full-scale nuclear disarmament. With the recent tensions in India and Pakistan, and concerns about nuclear proliferation around the globe, public attention is once again focused on the worldwide nuclear situation. The author is at the forefront of the discussion. In February 1998, his lengthy essay constituted the centerpiece of a special, widely distributed issue of The Nation dealing with the nuclear arms race. The relevance of his two books for today’s debates is undeniable, as many experts assert that the nuclear situation is more dangerous than ever.
The First Atomic Bomb: The Trinity Site In New Mexico 
Janet Farrell Brodie
University of Nebraska Press, 2023
In The First Atomic Bomb Janet Farrell Brodie explores the history of the Trinity test and those whose contributions have rarely, if ever, been discussed—the men and women who constructed, served, and witnessed the first test—as well as the downwinders who suffered the consequences of the radiation. Concentrating on these ordinary people, laborers, ranchers, and Indigenous peoples who lived in the region and participated in the testing, Brodie corrects the lack of coverage in existing scholarship on the essential details and everyday experiences of this globally significant event. The First Atomic Bomb also covers the environmental preservation of the Trinity test site and compares it with the wide range of atomic sites now preserved independently or as part of the new Manhattan Project National Historical Park. Although the Trinity site became a significant node for testing the new weapons of the postwar United States, it is known today as an officially designated National Historic Landmark. Brodie presents a timely, important, and innovative study of an explosion that carries special historical weight in American memory.
First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War
George Weller
Broadway Books, 2006
This book is a collection of reports by Chicago Daily News foreign correspondent George Weller. Originally written in 1945 but not approved for publication by Gen. Douglas MacArthur‘s military censors, the reports were found, collected and edited by the author’s son Anthony Weller, and published for the first time. George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, entered Nagasaki on September 6, 1945, four weeks after the atomic blast leveled the city. The first Westerner to tour the city’s ruins, he talked with doctors at the makeshift hospitals and scoured the countryside in search of the POW camps scattered across southern Japan over several weeks. His eyewitness dispatches were intercepted and buried, however, by Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s censors. Weller saved his carbons, but they disappeared in the hectic months after the war and remained lost for 60 years, until rediscovered after his death by his son Anthony, himself a journalist and a novelist.
From Trinity to Trinity
Kyoko Hyashi
Station Hill Press, 2010
Station Hill Press just published Eiko Otake’s translation of From Trinity to Trinity, a novella by Kyoko Hayashi, with an extensive introduction by Eiko. Hayashi’s story traces an atomic bomb survivor on her trip to the Trinity site in New Mexico where the atomic bomb was first tested. Hayashi, through the voice of a narrator, mourns for the plants and creatures of the southwest landscape that were the first victims of an atomic blast. Her journey takes her into unfamiliar terrain, both past and present, as she not only confronts American attitudes, disconcertingly detached from the suffering of nuclear destruction, but discovers as well a profound kinship with desert plants and animals, the bomb’s “first victims.” Otake’s theatrical adaptation of From Trinity to Trinity was presented at New York Theatre Workshop as part of Hibakusha Stories programming in May, 2010.
Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
Kristen Iversen
Broadway Books, 2013 revised
Full Body Burden is Kristen Iversen’s story of growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant. It’s also a book about the destructive power of secrets—both family secrets and government secrets. Her father’s hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what they made at Rocky Flats—best not to inquire too deeply into any of it. But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions and discovered some disturbing realities.
As this memoir unfolds, it reveals itself as a brilliant work of investigative journalism—a shocking account of the government’s sustained attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic and radioactive waste released by Rocky Flats, and of local residents’ vain attempts to seek justice in court. Based on extensive interviews, FBI and EPA documents, and class-action testimony, this taut, beautifully written book promises to have a very long half-life.
Hiroshima
John Hersey
Turtleback Books, 1946, revised 1989
On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. This account of the bombing of Hiroshima is told from the perspective of six survivors. Almost four decades after the original publication of the book, John Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told. His account of what he discovered about them is now the final chapter of Hiroshima. This book, John Hersey’s journalistic masterpiece, tells what happened on that day. Told through the memories of survivors, this timeless, powerful and compassionate document has become a classic “that stirs the conscience of humanity” It is an unforgettably powerful book and highly recommended as a classroom assignment.
Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War
Susan Southard
Viking, 2015
Nagasaki takes us on the astonishing journeys of five survivors, all teenagers at the time of the bombing. From 1945 to Nagasaki today, we watch them and hibakusha across the city navigate an uncertain future with punishing injuries, acute and late-onset radiation-related illnesses, and haunting fears that they would pass on genetic disorders to their children and grandchildren. In a remarkable demonstration of human resilience, a small number of hibakusha made the very personal choice to speak out about their experiences, even as U.S. policies kept their suffering hidden in both in their own country and across the world. The survivors’ goal: To ensure that Nagasaki remains the last atomic-bombed city in history. Susan Southard spent more than a decade researching and interviewing hibakusha and atomic bomb historians, physicians, and specialists to reconstruct the days, months, and years after the bombing. Using powerful eyewitness accounts, Southard unveils this neglected story of the enduring impact of nuclear war.
Nuclear Is Not The Solution 
M. V. Ramana
Random House, 2024
The Climate Crisis has propelled nuclear energy back into fashion. Its proponents argue we already have the technology of the future and that it only needs perfection and deployment. Nuclear Is Not the Solution demonstrates why this sort of thinking is not only naïve but dangerous.
Even beyond the horrific implications of meltdown and the intractable problem of waste disposal, nuclear is not practicable on such a large scale. Any appraisal of future energy technology depends on two important parameters: cost and time. Nuclear fails on both counts. It is more costly than its renewable competitors wind and solar. And, importantly given the need for rapid transformation, it is slow. A plant takes a decade to come online. If you include permits and fundraising, this adds another decade. And we should not forget the deep roots it has in the defense industry.
M. V. Ramana’s powerful book destroys any illusion that nuclear is our answer to climate change, untangling technical arguments into simple and sensible language. Importantly, Nuclear Is Not the Solution also unmasks the powerful groups with vested interests in the maintenance of the status quo, currently working hard to greenwash a spectacularly dirty industry.
Nuclear Nuevo México 
Myrriah Gómez
University of Arizona Press, 2022
In the 1940s military and scientific personnel chose the Pajarito Plateau to site Project Y of the secret Manhattan Project, where scientists developed the atomic bomb. Nuevomexicanas/os and Tewa people were forcibly dispossessed from their ranches and sacred land in north-central New Mexico with inequitable or no compensation.
Contrary to previous works that suppress Nuevomexicana/o presence throughout U.S. nuclear history, Nuclear Nuevo México focuses on recovering the voices and stories that have been lost or ignored in the telling of this history. By recuperating these narratives, Myrriah Gómez tells a new story of New Mexico, one in which the nuclear history is not separate from the collective colonial history of Nuevo México but instead demonstrates how earlier eras of settler colonialism laid the foundation for nuclear colonialism in New Mexico.
Nuclear War: A Scenario
Annie Jacobsen
Dutton, 2024
There is only one scenario other than an asteroid strike that could end the world as we know it in a matter of hours: nuclear war. And one of the triggers for that war would be a nuclear missile inbound toward the United States.
Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These investigations are vital to how we understand the world we really live in—where one nuclear missile will beget one in return, and where the choreography of the world’s end requires massive decisions made on seconds’ notice with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario explores this ticking-clock scenario, based on dozens of exclusive new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons, have been privy to the response plans, and have been responsible for those decisions should they have needed to be made. Nuclear War: A Scenario examines the handful of minutes after a nuclear missile launch. It is essential reading, and unlike any other book in its depth and urgency.
The Ocean On Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists
Anaïs Maurer
Duke University Press, 2024
Bombarded with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for half a century, Pacific people have long been subjected to man-made cataclysm. Well before climate change became a global concern, nuclear testing brought about untimely death, widespread diseases, forced migration, and irreparable destruction to the shores of Oceania. In The Ocean on Fire, Anaïs Maurer analyzes the Pacific literature that incriminates the environmental racism behind radioactive skies and rising seas. Maurer identifies strategies of resistance uniting the region by analyzing an extensive multilingual archive of decolonial Pacific art in French, Spanish, English, Tahitian, and Uvean, ranging from literature to songs and paintings.
One Thousand Paper Cranes: The Story of Sadako and the Children’s Peace Statue
Ishii Takayuki
Dell Laurel Leaf Books, 2001
Ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Sadako Sasaki died as a result of the Atomic Bomb Disease. Sadako’s determination to fold one thousand paper cranes, symbolizing her hope for peace and her courageous struggle with her illness inspired her classmates. After her death, they started a national campaign to build the Children’s Peace Statue in memory of Sadako and the many other children who were victims of the bombing of Hiroshima. To this day, in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, the statue of Sadako is beautifully decorated with thousands of paper cranes brought and sent by people around the world.
Pika-Don
Adam Johnson and Tom Kealy
Stanford Graphic Novel Project, 2010
Although the actual death tolls remain unknown, the 1945 atomic bomb attacks killed approximately 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki. The survivors suffered from the effects of radiation and many developed diseases such as cancer. Portraying their concerns became our challenge in writing Pika-Don. Nuclear disarmament was a dream held by one man whose story touched our hearts. Pika-Don chronicles Tsutomu Yamaguchi’s life; he was a Japanese ship designer who survived the 1945 atomic bombings in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Radioactive Ghosts
Gabriele Schwab
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Focusing on the legacies of the Manhattan Project, Hiroshima, and nuclear energy politics, Radioactive Ghosts takes us on a tour of the little-seen sides of our nuclear world. Examining devastating uranium mining on Native lands, nuclear sacrifice zones, the catastrophic accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, and the formation of a new transspecies ethics, Schwab shows how individuals threatened with extinction are creating new adaptations, defenses, and communal spaces. Ranging from personal accounts of experiences with radiation to in-depth readings of literature, film, art, and scholarly works, Schwab gives us a complex, idiosyncratic, and personal analysis of one of the most overlooked issues of our time.
Rebel Journalism: The Writings of Wilfred Burchett
Edited by George Burchett & Nick Shimmin
Cambridge University Press, 2007
This book is an anthology of the writing of Wilfred Burchett, perhaps the greatest journalist and war correspondent Australia has ever produced. He was also one of the most controversial figures of the Cold War, both in Australia and overseas. Burchett published more than 30 books, and this volume brings together extracts from most of these, spanning the entire breadth of his career, from before World War 2, through Hiroshima, Eastern Europe, Korea, Russia, Laos, Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Angola, Rhodesia and other areas from which Burchett reported. The book presents these fields of reportage chronologically, and thus serves not only as a significant historical overview of the period, but also as a reader in Cold War journalism
Wastelanding
Traci Brynne Voyles
University of Minnesota Press, 2015
Wastelanding tells the history of the uranium industry on Navajo land in the U.S. Southwest, asking why certain landscapes and the peoples who inhabit them come to be targeted for disproportionate exposure to environmental harm. Uranium mines and mills on the Navajo Nation land have long supplied U.S. nuclear weapons and energy programs. By 1942, mines on the reservation were a source of uranium for the top-secret Manhattan Project. Today, the Navajo Nation is home to more than a thousand abandoned uranium sites. Radiation-related diseases are endemic, claiming the health and lives of former miners and nonminers alike.
In examining the history of wastelanding in Navajo country, Voyles provides “an environmental justice history” of uranium mining, revealing how just as “civilization” has been defined on and through “savagery,” environmental privilege is produced by portraying other landscapes as marginal, worthless, and pollutable.
World As Lover, World As Self – Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal
Joanna R. Macy
Parallax Press, 2007
A new beginning for the environment must start with a new spiritual outlook. In this book, author Joanna Macy offers concrete suggestions for just that, showing how each of us can change the attitudes that continue to threaten our environment. Using the Buddha’s teachings on “Paticca Samuppada,” which stresses the interconnectedness of all things in the world and suggests that any one action affects all things, Macy describes how decades of ignoring this principle has resulted in a self-centeredness that has devastated the environment. Humans, Macy implores, must acknowledge and understand their connectedness to their world and begin to move toward a more focused effort to save it. This book focuses on our interconnectedness with the natural world, the psychology behind our apparent disconnect and how to begin to change it by coming back to our rightful place in nature.