War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination

By Howard Bruce Franklin

Book Overview

In this new and expanded edition of an already classic work, H. Bruce Franklin brings the epic story of the superweapon and the American imagination into the ominous twenty-first century, demonstrating its continuing importance both to comprehending our current predicament and to finding ways to escape from it.

Sweeping through two centuries of American culture and military history, Franklin traces the evolution of superweapons from Robert Fulton's eighteenth-century submarine through the strategic bomber, atomic bomb, and Star Wars to a twenty-first century dominated by "weapons of mass destruction," real and imagined. Interweaving culture, science, technology, and history, he shows how and why the American pursuit of the ultimate defensive weapon--guaranteed to end all war and bring universal triumph to American ideals--has led our nation and the world into an epoch of terror and endless war.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1558496513
• ISBN13: 9781558496514
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.1"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Level 1........

You know the feeling you get from a book that gets better and more interesting as you read it. This is one of those books. He is a very good writer. I listened to a Chomsky talk/interview who recommended the book. I thought SciFi was crap. But he showed it to be a kind of wonderful window of our thoughts, fears and hopes for the far or not so far future. Example after example of superweapons from 1798 - 1980's that were touted as the final weapon that would make war obsolete are exposed as fantasy. Now we face weapons that if used will make us obsolete. I must read......