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The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor | 
 enlarge | Author: John Mcphee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 210922
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 236
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 0374515980
Dewey Decimal Number: 621.483
EAN: 9780374515980
ASIN: 0374515980
Publication Date: April 1, 1994
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Condition: SLIGHT STAINING ON INNER COVER, COVER IS WORN, COVER PAGE REMOVE TO PROTECT PREVIOUS OWNER, NICE COPY OTHERWISE! Good reading copy. Expedited orders placed before 3 PM EST ship the SAME DAY. Automatic Upgrade to Priority Mail shipping on U.S. orders over $40. Multiple books ordered from Look at a Book in a single checkout will help you reach the $40 threshold for your free Priority Mail Upgrade! Satisfaction Guaranteed!
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Amazon.com Review
Theodore B. Taylor was among the most ingenious engineers of the nuclear age. He created the most powerful and the smallest nuclear weapons of his time (his masterpiece, the Davy Crockett, weighed in at a svelte 50 pounds) and also spearheaded efforts to create a nuclear-powered spacecraft. But in his later years, Taylor became increasingly concerned that compact and powerful bombs could be easily built not just by nations employing experts such as himself, but by single individuals with modest technical ability and perseverance. McPhee tours American nuclear installations with Taylor, and we are treated to a grim, eye-opening account of just how close we are to witnessing terrorist attacks using homemade nuclear weaponry. The Curve of Binding Energy is compelling writing about an urgently important topic.
Product Description
Theodore Taylor was one of the most brilliant engineers of the nuclear age, but in his later years he became concerned with the possibility of an individual being able to construct a weapon of mass destruction on their own. McPhee tours American nuclear institutions with Taylor and shows us how close we are to terrorist attacks employing homemade nuclear weaponry.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 Great Info on Nukes July 2, 2008
The Curve of Binding Energy by John McPhee is just a terrific read for anyone interested in the twin topics of nuclear energy and the nuclear bomb. We've all read stories about the negative environmental effects of storing used nuclear fuel, but you rarely are made aware of the other negative externality of used nuclear fuel; the threat to national security.
In this quickly-read, reportorial book written at the end of the seventies, McPhee follows the thoughts of Ted Taylor, a nuclear physicist and bomb designer. Taylor provides accounts of his work at Los Alamos and how the development of the nuclear bomb evolved from Fat Man and Little Boy to Super Oralloy and Mike. This is very interesting stuff with descriptions of bomb material, explosive yields, fission and fusion. Taylor was clearly conflicted with his work around the bomb and subsequent to leaving Los Alamos has devoted his expertise to developing safeguards and to raising awareness of the threat of a rogue bomb. This is where the connections are made between nuclear energy and nuclear weaponry. Much of the spent nuclear fuel stored in various physical states can be used to develop a workable nuclear bomb. Taylor focuses on the weaknesses in protective measures and the vulnerability of these supplies. An interesting point that is brought up near the end of the book is the comparative figures invested in fission research and coal power versus the amount of investment in fusion research (a much cleaner, less dangerous alternative). It leaves you seeing no reason why the government would resist funding a Manhattan Project around fusion technology. While no one can debate the usefulness of nuclear energy, especially given current conditions, it is important to remember the negative externalities associated with this power platform.
As with any McPhee book, I'm amazed at the level of detail he is able to provide which leads you to a much better understanding of a topic you may have known very little about before. The book also seems very topical as economic pressures will now encourage further development of nuclear power resources.
Thought provoking and enlightening June 13, 2008
The book is written by a respected author who appears to have become enamored with Theodore Taylor, an nuclear weapons designer. The two traveled to many places together, and the author plied Taylor with questions. The setting was the early 1970s, and nuclear weapons information was still secret, and the nuclear industry still appeared to be viable. Taylor did his best to answer questions and explain nuclear physics without violating classification. Since then, much has changed, and today Taylor could be more specific. When I wrote "The Rings of Allah," a story based upon gun-type atomic weapons, I would Goggle an item to see what was in the public domain before using the material in my book. Frankly, I was amazed and frightened by the amount of nuclear weapons data available on the internet.
THE CURVE OF BINDING ENERGY must be viewed in this context. Also, the author, John McPhee, had to record and then present in a understandable manner, the technical information provided by a remarkable man. The author does not have a degree in physics or nuclear physics, and thus can be excused for not understanding some of what Taylor told him.
The book contains a wide ranging view, from Dr. Taylor's perspective, of the early nuclear industry and weapons program. Most of the errors I found are unimportant, since only people in the nuclear weapons program would recognize them. These I attribute to the author not understanding Taylor's remarks. I do take exception to Dr. Taylor's obsession with plutonium as a source of nuclear weapons materials for terrorists. Plutonium is the wrong choice for complex technical reasons. Should a terrorist obtain weapons grade plutonium (Pu-239), he would most likely accidentally assemble a critical mass, a self sustaining nuclear fission reaction--the equivalent of a nuclear reactor melt down. In other words, a small Chernobyl.
Dr. Taylor grossly oversimplifies explosive implosions spheres. He talks about fabricating one from TNT or C-4, using bowls as a mold. Pure fantasy. He also describes casting plutonium components, half spheres for the "pit" of an implosion device. Yes, in general terms that is how it is done, but he left out a large amount of details. Anyone attempting to follow his crude outline will meet with an untimely end, and so would the neighbors. Perhaps that was his intention.
Taylor styles himself as the inventor of several innovative small, high yield nuclear warheads. He looks at nuclear weapons from an inventors perspective, while I look at the weapons from an engineer's and users' perspective. I do not recall coming across his name, but since most of my dealing were with Sandia Corporation and the AEC, this in not surprising. I am, however, familiar with the weapons he mentions. I will only point out one minor mistake: the Mk-41 was similar in physical size to the Mk-17, and had a yield of 25 MT. It was the highest yield nuclear weapon in the U.S. inventory.
Taylor's major concern centered on the isotope he worked with--Pu-239. As stated in the book, Pu-239 is superior to U-235 for small, high yield nuclear weapons. Pu is a very toxic, hazardous metal to work with. For example, plutonium has five phases, while most elements have three: solid, liquid, and gas. Recovering Pu-239 from power reactor spent fuel rods is extremely difficult and expensive. Plutonium used in nuclear weapons is produced in a special type of nuclear reactor, a breeder reactor. Iran has one breeder reactor operating and another under construction. Dr. Taylor's warning about nuclear weapons proliferation is right on target.
Much of the book is devoted to the danger of theft of nuclear materials from poorly guarded storage facilities. If Taylor were discussing these issues with McPhee today, I believe he would place emphases on two different issues: poorly guarded spent nuclear fuel rods stored in cement pigs at nuclear reactors, the ideal source of radioactive materials for a dirty bomb; and, nuclear programs in North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran.
Today's terrorist nuclear threat is uranium nuclear weapons--gun-type U-235 devices that a terrorist can make if provided with a sufficient amount of highly enriched uranium (90% U-235). Dr. Taylor mentions the Little Boy (page 220), the simple gun-type nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and gun-type nuclear bombs several times. He, Dr. Taylor, finally gets to the real danger on pages 189-191. In 1973, Dr. Taylor, nor I, could envision a world where a rouge nations (North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan) would obtain the ability to produce weapons grade U-235 and Pu-239. Our concern was the Soviet Union and China. Weapon design information did not exist on the internet--there was no internet--and the thought of a nation purposefully providing U-235 and plans for a simple gun-type nuclear device to terrorists was beyond comprehension. Today this situation exists.
Today, it is possible to take the Little Boy design, and by incorporating commercially available components, build a nuclear device with a yield several times the Little Boy. A that can be disassembled and imported as parts into the U.S. or any other nation. I tell such a story in The Rings of Allah, and the consequences in Behold, an Ashen Horse. I wish Dr. Taylor was alive to comment on my work. I found his story fascinating.
The CURVE OF BINDING ENERGY is a thought provoking, enlightening, if out of date, book. Reading it will be time well spent.
 OLD book needs massive update, still interesting January 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
First and foremost this book was published in 1973. Any book about nuclear security that's 35 years old will have some obvious gaps but this one makes many bold predictions about the growth in nuclear power that obviously did not happen.
There is quite a bit to learn here though and anyone interested in how nuclear materials might be used for terrorism would do well to read this.
I found it very enlightening and honest and a good read on some reasons why nuclear power could be a problem in the future. Truly though, this is a book in need of a major rewrite and updating. The same material covered once again would be very worth reading.
books can kill July 22, 2007
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I picked up this book to learn something about the risks associated with nuclear technology in the hands of terrorist states. What I read instead was an unexpected cautionary tale about the risks of irresponsible journalism.
The Curve of Binding Energy is an early piece by the talented essayist, John McPhee. McPhee explores the psyche and experience of a nuclear engineer, Ted Taylor, who in the 1950's made substantial contributions to the miniaturization of fission bombs and then became an advocate for "nuclear safeguards" - i.e. methods and policies to keep weapons-grade material or bomb-making technology out of criminal or terrorist hands.
Mr. Taylor's involvement in the book is highly ironic. Like most in the nuclear weapons community, he originally justified the work for its deterrent potential. Looking back two decades later, Taylor tells McPhee that the original rationale was naive. But unconsciously applying the same logic, Taylor was now willing to publicize all that he knew about the easiest ways to make a cheap A-bomb in the hope that proliferation of that knowledge would scare governments into adopting more effective safeguards.
Throughout the book, McPhee relates conversations in which he pumped Taylor for technical details about bomb construction. Each time, Taylor states that he has gone into just as much detail as he can on various subjects without breaching official secrets. This of course is nonsense. Any attempts to delineate the bounds of official secrets, and especially the juxtaposition of related methods and means are expressly forbidden by the security oath that Taylor once swore. If a terrorist nuclear bomb is ever detonated, Taylor will bear direct personal responsibilty.
Fortunately, the value of Taylor's technical insights is much less that McPhee implies. He reports many kind comments about Taylor from distinguished nuclear physicists who worked on the same projects. But none of these scientists express particular respect for his technical skills. And at least one of Taylor's important judgments in this book - that successful fission detonations are easy to achieve - was proved untrue last year when a DPRK demonstration fizzled.
No, to date no one has been killed or injured by one of Ted Taylor's creations. But the same cannot be said of John McPhee. The most intriguing details in The Curve of Binding Energy are its repeated speculations about the attractiveness of the WTC towers as terrorist targets and their vulnerability to destruction from a sub-nuclear explosion. It appears highly likely that this book was the original motivation behind O. A. Rahman's truck-bomb attack in 1993 and K. S. Mohammad's follow-on attack in 2001.
This is not a personal criticism of John McPhee. The point is that journalists - even great journalists - plying their own craft can do just as much unintended damage as any of their usual suspects.
The story of Theodore Taylor, nuclear bomb designer, and problems of safeguarding of nuclear materials in the 1960's and 70's March 10, 2007
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book was first published in 1973 and its basic premises are straightforward. Plutonium is an almost unavoidable byproduct of a uranium based nuclear power industry. It is incredibly easy to make a working atomic bomb with plutonium. It is also incredibly easy to steal plutonium. It is possible to make a nuclear bomb as small as a rugby football. Terrorism with a plutonium bomb seems to be inevitable.
Much of the book is about Theodore Taylor, who was one of America's most brilliant nuclear bomb engineers. Technically, he was a physicist, but he was really lousy at true theoretical physics, and he ended up working at Los Alamos as a nuclear bomb designer only because he had flunked out of the Ph.D program at UC Berkeley. Taylor was more of an inventor with the mentality of an engineer in the way he focused on using best estimates and trial and error experimentation to solve difficult practical problems.
Later in his life, Taylor was involved in the abortive Orion project (a space ship that was to be powered by hundreds of small nuclear bombs), and became a strong advocate of improved safeguarding of nuclear materials in the nuclear power industry. It should be clarified that after he quit as a nuclear bomb designer, Taylor never became an anti-nuclear activist. I say this mainly because this book does seem to have been used by the anti-nuclear movement.
The remainder of the book is mostly devoted to describing just how lax the safeguarding of nuclear materials was at the time, as well as brief descriptions of the chemical processes needed to isolate enough plutonium from these byproducts to make a crude bomb.
One annoying aspect of this book is its coy squeamishness at revealing the secrets of making hydrogen (fusion) bombs. Hydrogen bomb design is actually pretty straightforward once you have a fission bomb to ignite the fusion materials - other books like "Dark Sun" lay out the basic details that this book would not.
A major concept missing from this book is that, while stealing several kilograms of plutonium and making one or two plutonium bombs might be fairly simple, when it comes to governments building a nuclear bomb, it is clearly more advantageous to have a complete nuclear industry, so as to be able to build an endless supply of nuclear bombs with either uranium or plutonium. And so these states would want to start by first developing a uranium enrichment capability together with nuclear power plants. This is in fact how things have played out today.
And so, this book turns out to be somewhat myopic in its fears. Its warnings against the production of plutonium by the nuclear power industry, while important, and salient at the time (1970's) to the fears of terrorism by small radical groups, pale in comparison to the much greater current problem of global nuclear weapons development by nation-states. The book misses completely the fact that today, almost any technologically advanced country, and many that are not so advanced, can build entire arsenals of nuclear bombs if they want to.
Is nuclear war inevitable? That possibility seemed to have faded with the breakup of the Soviet Union, but has risen again as the numbers of conflict states developing nuclear weapons increase.
But then look on the bright side, for all of you liberal, anti-growth, anti-nuclear, anti-people environmentalists out there. The nuclear winter first predicted by Carl Sagan, together with an accompanying drastic reduction in the numbers of homo sapiens defiling this planet, could be just the cures for global warming and global over-population that you are seeking.
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