Star Warriors is a detailed look at a very strange group of people in a very strange place. O Group was a small team of about twenty to forty scientists, most in their mid-20s, mostly white, mostly with Caltech and MIT pedigrees, and all male, at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in 1985. Under the direction of Lowell Wood, O Group worked on applications for third generation nuclear weapons, primarily the "Star Wars" missile defense project based around bomb pumped X-ray lasers. The team also dabbled in supercomputer programming, fusion research, and starship design. Broad uses a week of interviews with O Group to provide flesh to what's often an abstract debate about nuclear strategy and technology policy.

The picture that emerges is of an elite scientific team, sharply competitive with each other and hand-picked by Lowell Wood through his control of the Hertz Fellowship (Wood was in line to succeed Edward Teller as director of LLL before a classification scandal broke his career momentum). What drives these people is the desire to be the best, to prove it mathematically, as when the soul of the group, Peter Hagelstein, made the key calculations that proved X-ray lasers were possible. These are no political naifs, but hardened Cold Warriors who see the Soviet Union as fundamentally evil, and their work as a way to gain a strategic edge. Unlike Reagan, who imagined a perfect shield, they know the limits of any system, and believe that the possibility of merely blunting a nuclear strike might prevent escalation to nuclear war, and that forcing the Soviets to compete on defense would further drain their resources. But above all else, it seems to be the coolness of the physics, of the way that the basic laws of reality break down at a thermonuclear shock front, and how that energy can be harnessed to make dreams real.

Over 30 years on, Star Warriors is a historical curiosity. It still stands as a fascinating look at some very interesting scientists, right next to The Soul of a New Machine.