The Twilight of the Bombs; Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons

New York: Vintage Books, 2010. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Very good/No DJ issued. Format is approximately 5.25 inches by 8 inches. Illustrated cover. x,458 pages. Illustrations. Footnotes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Richard Lee Rhodes (born July 4, 1937) is an American historian, journalist, and author of both fiction and nonfiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), and most recently, Energy: A Human History (2018). Rhodes has been awarded grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation among others. Rhodes is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He also frequently gives lectures and talks on a broad range of subjects, including testimony to the U.S. Senate on nuclear energy. Rhodes came to national prominence with his 1986 book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a narrative of the history of the people and events during World War II from the discoveries leading to the science of nuclear fission in the 1930s, through the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among its many honors, the 900-page book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in English alone, as well as having been translated into a dozen or so other languages. The final volume in Richard Rhodes's prizewinning history of nuclear weapons offers the first comprehensive narrative of the challenges faced in the post-Cold War age. The past twenty years have transformed our relationship with nuclear weapons drastically. With extraordinary depth of knowledge and understanding, Richard 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 reveals the real reasons George W. Bush chose to fight a second war in Iraq, assesses the emerging threat of nuclear terrorism, and offers advice on how our complicated relationships with North Korea and South Asia should evolve. Finally, he imagines what a post-nuclear world might look like, as only he can. Derived from a Kirkus review: The foremost historian of the birth, growth and spread of nuclear weapons examines developments in the post-Cold War era. Since the publication of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won nearly every major book award, Rhodes has owned the story of nuclear weapons. A series of set-pieces brings the story up to date—South Africa's pursuit and eventual dismantling of its nuclear arsenal, the Clinton administration's negotiations with North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program and the arms race between Pakistan and India. Rhodes devotes the bulk of the narrative, however, to two stories: Iraq's secret bomb program under Saddam Hussein—and the costly miscalculations that led to the second Gulf War—and the era's signature event, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the mostly successful attempt to secure the Soviet nuclear arsenal as republics within the old empire declared independence. The author approvingly quotes an expert who calls the removal of nuclear weapons from Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan "the single most important accomplishment of the 1990s." Although Rhodes includes a section on the frightening potential for nuclear terrorism, he delivers a surprisingly upbeat verdict on the future, noting that "more nations gave up their nuclear ambitions during the 1990s than sought to acquire those weapons of terror and mass death." A skillful assessment of the transformation of nuclear weapons from the so-called guardians of our security during the Cold War to the burden and catastrophic threat they pose today.