The Warhead: The Quest to Build the Perfect Weapon in the Age of Modern Warfare

An Apple Best Book of the Month

From award-winning journalist and coauthor of The 15:17 to Paris, an affecting human history of the first self-steering bomb

Paveway, the first "smart" bomb, was created to be a more precise and ostensibly humane weapon, reducing civilian casualties. The true impact of the bomb, however, is ever more complex and unpredictable.

In The Warhead, Jeffrey Stern tells the story of Paveway through the lives of seven interconnected stories. They're stories of Nazis, Kennedys, Operation Paperclip, and Walt Disney; of the Apollo mission and the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Paveway inadvertently sparked the personal computing revolution and the adoption of GPS, it ushered in the era of modern warfare, and it shows up at critical historical moments throughout the last half century.

At once revelatory and deeply human, The Warhead unearths the complicated truth behind one of the most significant weapons of our time.

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Jeffrey E. Stern (Author)

Jeffrey E. Stern is an award-winning journalist and the author of five books, including his newest launch The Warhead, The 15:17 to Paris, which was adapted as a major motion picture by Clint Eastwood and Warner Brothers, and The Last Thousand: One School’s Promise in a Nation at War, an honorable mention for best book of the year by Library Journal. Stern co-wrote and produced the award-winning independent film Yasmeen’s Element, which premiered at the SXSW film festival and was named a “best of the fest.” He has been named a graduate fellow at the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation and a grantee of the Pulitzer Center Fellow for Crisis Reporting. Stern’s reporting has appeared in magazines such as The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic.

Stern has appeared on PBS NewsHour, The Lead with Jake Tapper on CNN, NPR’s Morning Edition, and MSNBC's Morning Joe. He has received the Overseas Press Club award for best human rights reporting in any medium, the Amnesty International award for foreign reporting, and was part of The New York Times team that won the 2019 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in international journalism for coverage of the war in Yemen. He is a founding board member of The 30 Birds Foundation and The Bamyan Foundation.