Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age

This well-researched history from Washington Post reporter Zak tells the riveting story of three nuclear weapons protestors and how, in 2012, they infiltrated the ultrasecure uranium-enrichment facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Sister Megan Rice, Greg Boertje-Obed, and Michael Walli took different paths to becoming activists opposed to nuclear weapons, but they united on a breathtaking mission to protest America’s ongoing nuclear program. Zak also dives into the history of how the United States devoted enormous resources to the initial development of the nuclear bomb. At one point, nuclear weapons accounted for 10% of the country’s gross national product, and the Oak Ridge facility alone consumed around 14% of the U.S.’s electricity. Zak shows how the country continues to grapple with the tension between ensuring peace and maintaining weapons with the power to cause our own extinction. Despite President Obama’s early experience of antinuclear activism, his administration has continued to prolong the life of the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Much of the antinuclear movement is intertwined with Christian ethics and the Catholic Church, and it still uses as its central metaphor the Biblical idea of turning swords into plowshares. Zak gracefully synthesizes the stories of the politicians and bureaucrats controlling stockpiles of weapons and those of the activists working to disarm them. [em]Agent: Lauren Clark, Kuhn Projects. (July) [/em]