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Snake Dance - Journeys Beneath a Nuclear Sky (Paperback)
Loot Price: R472
Discovery Miles 4 720
You Save: R49
(9%)
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Snake Dance - Journeys Beneath a Nuclear Sky (Paperback)
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List price R521
Loot Price R472
Discovery Miles 4 720
You Save R49 (9%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 17 working days
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In this unique journey across continents and centuries,
award-winning author Patrick Marnham explores the ruthless
dictators, dangerous minds and prehistoric precedents behind the
development of nuclear power.
The terrifying first use of nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in August 1945 was the most controversial act of warfare
in history, dramatically ending the Second World War but ushering
in the age of mass destruction. Yet it was also the climax of a
story that extends beyond Japan and Washington: the culmination of
decades of scientific achievement and centuries of colonial
exploitation.
"Snake Dance" is the account of a journey that turned into a quest
to discover how humanity reaches this point. Patrick Marnham
travels from the opulent nineteenth-century palaces of King Leopold
II of Belgium, built with riches plundered from the Congo, to the
lethally derelict nuclear reactor of modern-day Kinshasa. He
follows the shipment of Congolese uranium to the deserts of New
Mexico for the Manhattan Project's secret test detonation. Here he
uncovers the legacies of Robert Oppenheimer and Aby Warburg, two
'mad geniuses' who confronted the devastating power of
twentieth-century science in very different ways.
Both men travelled to New Mexico. Oppenheimer was honoured for
building a bomb, the ancestor of weapons that have enslaved
humanity. Warburg, condemned to obscurity and confined to a mental
hospital, regained his sanity by studying the rituals of the Native
Americans of the Southwest who, for thousands of years, practiced
the ritual of the 'snake dance' in an attempt to harness the power
of lightening. And it was in New Mexico, at Los Alamos, that the
ultimate act of playing God was realised.
The circle is closed in Japan. Faced with the catastrophe at the
Fukushima Nuclear Plant in March 2011, scientific man, like the
snake dancers, is faced with a power beyond his control. Spanning
three continents and the history of civilisation, "Snake Dance" is
at once an intrepid intellectual adventure and a wake-up call for
mankind.
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