A Technical History of America’s Nuclear Weapons by Dr. Peter A. Goetz

[Hanz2k]

Very good books about multiple technical aspects of US Nuclear forces, logistics and production. 2 parts available in Amazon - over 1200 pages. The only somehow weak point is that illustrations are BW.

 

[TJDougherty01]

I have the first edition of book 1 (revised first edition released just after I bought the original first edition). Lots of detailed information but in some chapters not particularly well arranged and some scattered in different chapters. You might think, well, I can look up what I am interested in using the Index. Sorry, no Index of subjects in the back. That said I find the information well worth it and would recommend the books. But often finding something specific can be a bit of a search without any Index. There are quite a number of references in the back of the book to reports, documents and books. However, there is no attempt (at least in the original edition version I have) of linking the text in the chapters to any of the reference materials. The reference sections are grouped by topics and not by chapter order.

A few minor errors, such as listing the diameter of the Hubble Telescope mirror as 72 inches, whereas it is 2.4 meters (94.5 inches) , when comparing it to the KH-9 optical assembly. But overall, very comprehensive and well researched.

I think it really could have used an editor to arrange some items in better order, and to generate an Index. If it was an electronic manuscript (as 99.9% are nowadays), an Index is much easier to assemble with word subject searches. And yes, the photos are all B&W. Some of those have a limited gray range and are somewhat washed out; those could have used some Photoshop dynamic range tweaking.