The Warhead: The Quest to Build the Perfect Weapon in the Age of Modern Warfare -- Jeffrey E. Stern, Hardcover

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.

Author: Jeffrey E. Stern
Publisher: Dutton
Published: 01/20/2026
Pages: 416
Binding Type: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781524746421

About the Author
Jeffrey E. Stern is an award-winning journalist and the author of five books, including 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. He has been named a graduate fellow at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation and a grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Stern's reporting has appeared in magazines such as The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic.