The Twilight of the Bombs

Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons

By Rhodes, Richard

Publishers Summary:
This culminating volume in Richard Rhodes’s monumental and prizewinning history of nuclear weapons offers the first comprehensive narrative of post–Cold War nuclear challenges. It examines the nuclear turning point the present day represents and casts a hopeful eye to the future.With his extraordinary depth of knowledge and understanding, Rhodes makes clear how the five original nuclear powers—Russia, Great Britain, France, China, and especially the United States—have struggled with new realities. He shows us how the stage was set for a second tragic war when Iraq secretly destroyed its nuclear infrastructure and reveals the real reasons George W. Bush chose to fight a second ground war. We see how the efforts of U.S. weapons labs laid the groundwork for nuclear disarmament in the former Soviet Union; how and why South Africa secretly built and then destroyed a small nuclear arsenal; how Jimmy Carter’s private diplomacy prevented another Korean War. Rhodes assesses the emerging threat of nuclear terrorism and our complicated relationships with North Korea and South Asia. Finally, he imagines what a postnuclear world might look like, and what might make it possible.Powerful and persuasive—an essential work of contemporary history.

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ISBN
978-0-30726-754-2
Publisher
Knopf


REVIEWS

Library Journal

Reviewed on September 1, 2010

Pulitzer Prize-winning atomic weapons historian Rhodes (The Making of the Atom Bomb) completes his quartet on the history of nuclear weapons with this volume that picks up with the end of the Cold War in 1991. Rhodes takes us on a painstakingly researched trip through many nuclear hot spots, including former Soviet republics as well as Iraq, South Africa, and North Korea, next delving into where we stand today and musin...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

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