In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age,   ISBN:9781596916173

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Before I read "In Mortal Hands", Three Mile Island and Chernobyl as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki had become distant memories. This book is a real eye-opener for those of us who aren't nuclear experts. Stephanie Cooke does a masterful job of interweaving the facts about nuclear energy and weaponry with the personal stories and comments of those who made the history. She convincingly shows that the potential horrors of nuclear war or nuclear-related environmental disasters are too real a probability. I'm sure anyone interested in energy, science, or contemporary politics will find her work as captivating and enlightening as I did.

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The intent of the book is to show that operating nuclear plants in advanced countries will somehow enable rogue countries to make atomic bombs. The author's method is to barrage the reader with so much opinion and unrelated minutiae he won't notice that the author never makes the point intended.

So readers who have made up their minds against nuclear energy and only want reassurance will adore this book. Readers looking for real information on this important subject will only find frustration.

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George Santayana once wrote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." With all the talk about the renaissance of nuclear power (or, more aptly resuscitation, as Sharon Squassoni has put it), Stephanie Cooke's book is a useful reminder of the past. Cooke, a journalist who has covered the nuclear beat since the 1980s, has written a masterly account of the nuclear age, covering both the production of electricity and weapons, and the close connections between the two pursuits. Her familiarity with the industry and those who shaped it is apparent throughout the book, as evidenced by numerous references to "personal commmunication" from one key player or the other. Dancing between different time periods, across continents, and a range of themes, book is absorbing and, but for the fact that it was heavy, quite unputdownable.

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This book is an impressive piece of scholarship that was 8 years in the writing. It is a well-documented history and a good read, but also a frightening one. If you are not familiar with the history of nuclear weapons, this book will bring you up-to-date. The weapons business has been the prime driver in nuclear development and has matured into a worldwide situation called mutually assured destruction (MAD), a really mad stalemate in which, presumably, no nation (even North Korea?) would actually use nuclear weapons for fear of themselves coming under nuclear attack in return.

That is bad enough, but what frightens me even more is the concept of "atoms for peace", the use of nuclear power to generate a large part of the world's electricity at low cost. This would supposedly benefit everyone. But along with it, as this book documents in great detail, there are some really big problems. One of these is what to do with toxic waste, the spent nuclear fuel which is accumulating with no known safe method of long term disposal. This stuff is dangerous to people's health, commonly leading to various forms of cancer in later years. The danger is long lasting. Think a thousand years, or maybe even a hundred thousand years! Also, as the power plants become old and worn out there are the high costs of their replacement and the even higher costs of safely dismantling them. Suddenly the supposedly cheap electricity looks very expensive.

Another problem is accidents. The book gives us scary examples of the dangers of "peaceful" nuclear power, highlighting the unquantifiable risks of potentially unsafe technology coupled with operator errors and unpredictable human behavior. There is a detailed discussion of the accident at the Three Mile Island Pennsylvania power plant in 1979. It was considered the worst nuclear accident ever, until the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear station in the Soviet Union in 1986, which was much worse. The book's discussion of Chernobyl is especially chilling. A lesser accident that caught my eye occurred in 1966 in the Fermi nuclear power plant at Monroe, Michigan, just south of Detroit. This one was the first plant in the USA to use advanced breeder reactor technology. As it was being brought up to full power for the first time a number of things went wrong, causing the reactor core to start melting. It was shut down before it produced its first kilowatt of electricity. It took engineers and experts from all over the world more than three years of study to sort through the technical difficulties and finally start to bring the Fermi plant up to full power again. Fire and explosions followed, and the plant was again shut down, this time probably permanently. One engineer famously remarked, "Let's face it, we almost lost Detroit." That really caught my attention because Detroit was once my own home town!

During the years when I was a Naval Aviator I had some experience with nuclear weapons. Two things stand out in my memory. One was the morning of May 27, 1956, when my aircrew was on Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands during one of our early H-bomb tests. My diary tells me that we were walking to the mess hall in the dark at 5:56 AM when an H-bomb test explosion at Bikini, about 200 nautical miles away, "turned on the sun", giving us about 5 seconds of bright daylight. 15 minutes later, while we were eating breakfast, the shock wave hit Eniwetok like a clap of thunder.

The other memory, from the Cold War, was of me standing on the aircraft ramp at U.S. Naval Air Station, Brunswick, Maine, on an icy, windy 1963 winter morning. I watched my aircrew practice loading a dummy nuclear depth bomb into our P2V "Neptune" antisubmarine aircraft under the critical eyes of an operational readiness inspector. The level of step-by-step detail demanded in this drill impressed me with how careful we had to be when handling real nuclear weapons. I naively assumed that all nuclear weapons were safe in the hands of U.S. military personnel, and that everyone was as careful as we were during that weapon loading drill. I also assumed that civilian nuclear power plants were similarly safe. This book has awakened me to the naïveté of my assumptions.

We are all indebted to Stephanie Cooke for alerting us to the dangers in the world's present course of action on nuclear matters. I now go on record in stating that I am opposed both to nuclear weapons and also to "peaceful" nuclear power. I fear for my grandchildren, their children, and others to come, if there is still human life on earth by then. Read the book to see if you agree.

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In this book Stephanie Cooke covers the story of the nuclear industry from the start, and in particular she eschews, while explaining, the often pointless and misleading distinction made between its military and power-generating sides.

Having read this book I was put in mind of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Not because the premise of Cooke's book is anything like it- quite the opposite; this is a fairly lengthy history of just one thing- but because like Bryson's book this is uncompromisingly well researched, avoids patronising the reader at any time, and yet is so well written and lucid that on every page you just want to know more. And she does all this without even a hint of the sensationalism that can so easily be applied to anything to do with splitting the atom.

If you have ever wanted to to know more about the nuclear business, this is the place to go, and even if you haven't, you'll soon be pretty engaged, although you will be either astonished or dismayed by the mountain of malpractice on which the nuclear industry is built. Not that Cooke is setting out to rubbish the industry- she just sets out the facts, and they speak for themselves.

If we ever have a nuclear war or another Chernobyl this will immediately become the most important book ever written. I suggest you don't wait for that, and read it now.