Soviet Use of Nuclear Bombs for Economic ..‪.‬

Informative yet irreverent

I found this book interesting to read. Mainly because to my knowledge there are no books on this subject, and that makes it a fascinating read. Who would have known about half of the facts in this book? It's very interesting!
It seems well researched yet disappointingly the facts that are stated don't go into any real depth.
The quantitative values skip between imperial and metric, from yards to metres (meters), cubic feet to cubic metres. It's not that it's confusing, just inconsistent.

The biggest downfall of this piece however, is not the lack of quantitative values, which can totally be forgiven, but the attempt at sarcasm that the author uses throughout to carry the text along, ruins the book. It not only ruins the book but in places becomes almost prejudiced if not borderline racist against the Soviet people. Sentences such as (as quoted directly) '. they had been using regular explosives to carry out the soundings until 1971, when they decided "Hey, lets use a nuke" presumably several shots into a bottle of Stoli'.

Now, forgive my logic but the poor punctuation alone doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, sentences like this actually offended me! Although the majority of the text is informative yet only 40 pages long, I expected more from a piece with such an interesting title and I expected a more in depth analysis and report on what I consider an interesting subject. It merely catalogues dates and events, which you can't take away the amount of time and effort that must have gone into the research, but there is hardly anything else but the repetition of data.

As I stated before the text is obviously not to be taken completely serious mainly due to the irreverent nature of how it's presented and the off the cuff remarks such as ''Hey, we got these nukes and you got a salt bed, lets make magic happen"...or at least that is what I want to think happened.' (again bad punctuation deliberately quoted), hardly makes for a scientific study or analysis of how the USSR used nuclear bombs for economic growth. It just makes the author sound like (which I'm sure he is not) an idiotic, uneducated American writer. There are frequent similar quips that really don't need to be made and quite frankly put me off reading the book. The phrase 'or at least that is what I want to think happened' is regularly repeated and to be honest makes a mockery of the whole subject.

Thankfully this book was free on iTunes or I'd be asking for my money back.