NCW Libraries

"In Nuking the Moon, intelligence historian Vince Houghton proves that abandoned plans can be just as illuminating--and every bit as entertaining--as the ones that made it. Vividly capturing the fascinating stories of how twenty-one plans from WWII and the Cold War went from conception, planning, and testing to cancellation, Houghton explores what happens when innovation meets desperation: For every plan as good as D-Day, there's a scheme to strap...

In 1943, Hitler hatches a diabolical weapon: a bank of "superguns" housed in a massive underground complex in Nazi-occupied northern France. Together, the guns would be able to pump 600 high explosive shells 100 miles to London each hour, spelling doom for the Allies. Engineers, archaeologists, and WWII historians investigate this fearsome weapon and two audacious missions designed to destroy it.

For more than forty years, the U.S. government has researched extrasensory perception, using it in attempts to locate hostages, fugitives, secret bases, and downed fighter jets; to divine other nations' secrets; and even to predict future threats to national security. The intelligence agencies and military services involved include the CIA, DIA, NSA, DEA, the Navy, Air Force, and Army--and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now, for the first time, Jacobsen...

"Starting in the early 1960s, there was fear in America about the proliferation of computer database and networking technologies. People worried that these systems were going to be used by both corporations and governments for surveillance and control. Indeed, the dominant cultural view at the time was that computers were tools of repression, not liberation -- and that included the ARPANET, the military research network that would grow into the Internet...

In the fall of 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered a small team of scientists on a clandestine transatlantic mission to deliver his country's most valuable military secret, a revolutionary radar component, not to the U.S. government, but to a mysterious Wall Street tycoon, Alfred Lee Loomis. Using his connections, his money, and his brilliant scientific mind, Loomis and his team of scientists developed radar technology that would...

Presents a history of the most famous secret military installation in the world, assembled from interviews with the people who served there and formerly classified information.