I'll admit to being a fan of atomic kitsch, and in the decade between when I bought this book and when I finally read it, it's moved from non-fiction to its own kind of history of the Bush era. America's atomic history and present is scattered and hidden behind security fences. While some parts, like the Trinity test site, are more-or-less publicly accessible, with tours available if you're willing to follow government rules, other places, like Hanford or the Pantex Assembly Plant, are both fairly radioactive and "go-fuck-yourself" classified.

The people that Hodge and Weinberger talk to are proud of their role in national security, but also profoundly adrift. When this book was written, in the doldrums of the Bush era, everyone was scrambling for a bit of the agile, networked, counter-terrorism related money pipe. Nukes were both dowdy and tremendously expensive. There are some good laughs here, with half-empty "innovation centers" next to national labs experiencing bureaucratic collapses. My favorite part of the book was the tour of Kwajalein, a South Pacific atoll instrumented as a test range for ICBMs, and home to some of the purest forms of Homo Defensus Contractorus imaginable. A single missile shot at Kwaj costs about $100 million. Of course, it's not just beer sodden Americans there. Thousaunds of Marshall Islanders lead a tenuous existence, blasted off their islands by 1950s testing and subsisting on very unequal US aid. It's a hard life in the South Pacific.

A Nuclear Family Vacation doesn't have answers for question of what to do with the expensive and fail-deadly white elephants of the nuclear weapons complex, but it's an interesting look at them at a particular moment in time.