A 644-page U.S. government manual about what nuclear weapons do is not exactly light reading.
Fourmilab made it easier to navigate anyway.
Visit Fourmilab’s online edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons
The source is the 1977 third edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, compiled and edited by Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan and published by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Energy Research and Development Administration.
Its chapter list is grimly comprehensive.
General principles. Air and surface bursts. Air blast. Structural loading and damage. Ground shock. Thermal radiation. Initial radiation. Fallout. Radio and radar effects. Electromagnetic pulse. Biological effects.
The preservation work is visible
Fourmilab explains exactly what happened to this edition online.
A Princeton program had scanned the public-domain government publication into bitmap PDF files. That version later became difficult or impossible for the Fourmilab editor to locate. The surviving chapter files also repeated the title material at the beginning of each PDF.
So the files were edited.
Duplicate front matter was removed from individual chapters. The title page, preface, acknowledgements, glossary, SI-unit guide, and index were broken out separately. A new XHTML table of contents was built to make the material usable again.
That is small-scale digital preservation in its purest form: not merely copying files, but repairing the interface around them.
The page even documents a failed attempt to deep-link directly to PDF page numbers because browser/PDF behavior did not work reliably enough.
Alongside the book is an online version of the Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer that accompanied an earlier edition.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes many pages where somebody quietly rescued technical material after an institutional host stopped being dependable.
This one preserves a Cold War reference work whose table of contents alone tells you how seriously governments modeled catastrophe.
The subject is enormous.
The web preservation job was refreshingly practical.