9781982618889
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Burning the Sky audiobook

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Burning the Sky Audiobook Summary

“Last September the United States drew a thin curtain of radiation around the earth…The feat was regarded by some of its leading participants as the greatest scientific experiment of all time.” –Walter Sullivan, the New York Times, March 19, 1959

After the Soviet Union proved to the United States that it possessed an operational intercontinental ballistic missile with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the world watched anxiously as the two superpowers engaged in a game of nuclear one-upmanship. Amid this rising tension, Nicholas Christofilos, an eccentric Greek American physicist, brought forth an outlandish, albeit ingenious, idea to defend the United States from a Soviet attack: launching nuclear warheads to detonate in outer space, creating an artificial radiation belt that would fry incoming Soviet ICBMs. Known as Operation Argus, this plan is the most secret and riskiest scientific experiment in history, and classified details of these nuclear tests have been long obscured.

In Burning the Sky, Mark Wolverton tells the unknown and controversial story of this scheme to reveal a fascinating narrative that still has powerful resonances today. He chronicles Christofilos’ unconventional idea from its inception to execution, when he persuaded the military to carry out the dangerous test–using the entire Earth’s atmosphere as a laboratory. Combining his investigation of recently declassified military documents with more than a decade of experience in researching and writing about the science of the Cold War, Wolverton examines the scientific, political, and environmental implications of Argus, as well as that of the atmospheric tests that followed. He also discusses the roles played by physicist James Van Allen and President Eisenhower in the scheme, and how the whistle-blowing journalists at The New York Times blew the lid off what was supposed to be America’s ultimate nuclear secret.

Burning the Sky is an engrossing book that will intrigue any lover of scientific or military history and will remind readers why Project Argus remains frighteningly relevant nearly sixty years later.

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Burning the Sky Audiobook Narrator

John Lescault is the narrator of Burning the Sky audiobook that was written by Mark Wolverton

Patrick Cullen (a.k.a. John Lescault), a native of Massachusetts, is a graduate of the Catholic University of America. He lives in Washington, DC, where he works in theater.

About the Author(s) of Burning the Sky

Mark Wolverton is the author of Burning the Sky

Subjects

The publisher of the Burning the Sky is Blackstone Publishing. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is History, Military, Nuclear Warfare

Additional info

The publisher of the Burning the Sky is Blackstone Publishing. The imprint is Blackstone Publishing. It is supplied by Blackstone Publishing. The ISBN-13 is 9781982618889.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

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