The Nuclear Age

On 16 July 1945, the Nuclear Age began with the explosion of the first atomic bomb and the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer: "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."While the threat of mutually assured destruction kept a lid on a simmering and tense geopolitical landscape, events like the Chernobyl disaster and near-misses like the Cuban Missile Crisis showed that total destruction was only ever one malfunction, mistake, or miscommunication away. Now, as governments re-arm their nuclear arsenals, treaties designed to limit the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons fall away, and nuclear weapons come increasingly within reach of non-state actors, we are on the brink of a renaissance of the nuclear industry. Russia, China, and North Korea threaten nuclear aggression; India and Pakistan are locked in ongoing nuclear competition; and more countries than ever-such as Iran-have come within perilous reach of acquiring nuclear arms.In The Nuclear Age, acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy paints an intricate picture of a world governed by fear. From the first artificial splitting of the atom in 1917 and the race to create the first atomic bomb in World War II, through the fraught arms race of the Cold War, to the imperialism, neo-colonial motivation and wars being waged today, the threat posed by nuclear weapons is pertinent as ever.In this thrilling global history of nuclear arms, Plokhy examines the motivations of key players and confronts the crucial question of our age: what can we can learn from the first nuclear arms race that can help us to stop the new one?