People interested in the nuclear age have new sources of information available at the Fray Angélico Chavez History Library — 5,000 books and 3,400 other items donated recently by a Peoria, Ariz., man.

Al Bell's interest in all things nuclear began in college when he read an article on how to get the most out of life. One piece of advice was to "find a subject that you don't need to know anything at all about and learn everything you can about it, and keep learning," he said. He became a "big believer" in that philosophy.

In 1959, as a Navy pilot in Japan, Bell was recalibrating a drift sight in a plane over Hiroshima when he found himself staring through the instrument's cross hairs at the Aioi Bridge — ground zero for the first atomic bombing 14 years earlier. His interest was piqued, but Bell found little reading material about the bomb available back at the base or elsewhere in Japan. So when he returned stateside, he went straight to a used-book store and bought eight to 10 books on the subject.

"I was sitting very quietly reading one of them and all of a sudden, it clicked: 'Ah ha! This is my answer!' I was qualified to deliver nuclear bombs in the Navy, but I didn't even know the history," he said. "I really had no practical need for information about the nuclear age. ... So I decided to pursue it just for the fascination of it."

A few books in Bell's collection, which he titled "The Nuclear Age and Its Impact on Civilization," predate the nuclear age, such as C.C. Furnas' 1936 The Next Hundred Years: The Unfinished Business of Science, but most were published after World War II. One of the first postwar pieces is an epic poem: Hermann Hagedorn's 1946 The Bomb that Fell on America.

Some relate directly to New Mexico's role, like James W. Kunetka's 1978 City of Fire: Los Alamos and the Birthplace of the Atomic Age; efforts to steal the secrets of atomic fission, like Louis Nizer's 1973 The Implosion Conspiracy; and the first wartime uses of atomic weapons, like John Hersey's 1946 Hiroshima and Frank W. Chinnock's 1969 Nagasaki: The Forgotten Bomb.

A few are broad works with only snippets on nuclear weapons, like Trevor Nevitt Dupuy's 1965 18-volume The Military History of World War II, R.V. Jones' 1978 Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence, 1939-45, and Martin Walker's 1993 The Cold War: A History.

Some are instructions for using or at least threatening to use nuclear weapons, like physicist/futurologist Herman Kahn's 1960 On Thermonuclear War. Others are impassioned arguments for abolishing them, like the two volumes of chemist/peace advocate Linus Pauling's testimony before a Senate subcommittee in 1960. An anti-war teachers' guide from 1985, Beyond War, is balanced by Los Alamos National Laboratory's official history of 1986, Los Alamos 1943-45: The Beginning of an Era.

Some are strictly technical: The Effects of Nuclear Weapons prepared by the U.S. Department of Defense for the Atomic Energy Commission in 1962, 1979's Uranium: Resources, Production and Development by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Brookings Institution's 1987 Managing Nuclear Operations.

Others are purely fictional: Neil Shute's 1957 tragedy On the Beach (a 1959 film with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner), Ian Fleming's 1961 spy thriller Thunderball (a 1965 film with Sean Connery as James Bond) and a novelization of The Radioactive Camel Affair episode of the 1964-68 television series, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., starring Robert Vaughn and David McCallum.

The collection includes biographies and autobiographies by and about physicists Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr and J. Robert Oppenheimer; diplomats George Kennan, John Foster Dulles and Mikhail Gorbachev, and various figures from the dawn of the nuclear age, including Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman, Gens. Leslie Groves and Curtis LeMay, and pilots Claude Eatherly and Paul Tibbets.

Most of the collection is in English, but there are perspectives other than American — the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's 1972 study of the effect of the latest nonproliferation treaty on "near-nuclear countries," Keiji Nakazawa's 2005 book-length cartoon about Japanese boys dealing with the trauma of surrender in the aftermath of Hiroshima, Barefoot Gen: Out of the Ashes, with a foreword by Art Spiegelman, and four Russian posters with Soviet civilian-defense instructions for coping with nuclear combat.

Bell, 75, a retired community planner who worked in Orange County, Calif., said a few university libraries turned down his offer to donate his collection because it is not tightly focused and has no especially valuable tomes. He said he was thrilled when Tomas Jaehn, chief librarian for the state History Library, agreed to accept it. New Mexico's oldest library, dating from 1851, met Bell's criteria that admission must be free and the books and other reference materials are kept in closed stacks and must not leave the library at 120 Washington Ave. Hours are 1 to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 476-5090.

"I could not be happier about the collection's location," Bell said. "True, it's not in a major population center. It's not in a major university. ... But it's in a location that's totally appropriate for a collection on this subject because of the role of New Mexico in the origins of the nuclear age.

"It's my hope that others who have valuable pieces of the puzzle and are willing to offer them up will add to the collection over time and it will become the place a serious researcher has to go if he or she wants to really explore the subject thoroughly."

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.