To paint in my mind a truly holistic picture of nuclear war in America I read Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons (you can read my other nuclear war book review here). Unlike Nuclear War: A Scenario, Scoles’ book could have been presented as a New York Times article instead of a 272-page book. For me, the book has three aspects. First, nuclear laboratories are operated under the Department of Energy, and maintaining a fleet of nuclear warheads is expensive. Second, it seems as if every nuclear laboratory employee interviewed expressed the view that they never imagined themselves working here. Lastly, The Nuclear Warhead Treatise signed in the progressive 1960s completed its job, it helped protect against the Cold War from further escalating, but it also had an unexpected tangential aspect, it placed nuclear scientists in a difficult situation: how do we ensure the missiles are functioning properly if we can no longer blow a few up every year? The last point is interwoven throughout Countdown and takes up most of the word count—hence why this book fell under the classic office job, "this meeting could have just been an email." Countdown could have been a shorter article explaining the issue the Treatise presented along with how scientists have slowly created solutions for the problem in the subsequent sixty years since it passed.

A short answer to the question of how scientists now test nuclear weapons is simple: a lot of MIT graduates spend their time testing individual components at Los Alamos National Laboratory. While in the Coast Guard, whenever a major maintenance issue was discovered on one of our helicopters, or other Airbus helicopters, an updated procedure card would be issued across all air stations to quickly ensure that the same issue would not affect Air Station Miami's helicopters. I imagine the process of ensuring that a few hundred nuclear warheads are ready at a moment’s notice is a heightened (to use the term lightly) operation similar to how we maintained our helicopters: notice something is broken; make sure that component is updated across all systems accordingly.

At bottom, I still learned something new while reading Countdown. And at the end of the day, that’s all I can honestly ask for. Perhaps others have done this whole nuclear doomsday thing better (see Nuclear War: A Scenario), but Scoles’ research into modern day nuclear warhead dilemmas offers a different perspective than books exploring how many people will die if a nuclear bomb hit New York City. Instead, we meet the people working in the various nuclear weapons plants, along with unique clips concerning nuclear bomb history. Did you know that the government used to test nuclear bombs driving distance from Las Vegas? After losing a few hundred dollars on blackjack you can drive out further into the desert with Hunter S. Thompson and watch the world’s biggest manmade explosion.