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

Richard Rhodes

Aga 2010 · Kuthengiswe ngu-Vintage

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The culminating volume in Richard Rhodes’s monumental and prizewinning history of nuclear weapons, offering the first comprehensive narrative of the challenges faced in a post–Cold War age.

The past twenty years have transformed our relationship with nuclear weapons drastically. With 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 war in Iraq. We see how the efforts of U.S. weapons labs laid the groundwork for nuclear consolidation in the former Soviet Union, how and why South Africa secretly built and then destroyed a small nuclear arsenal, and how Jimmy Carter’s private diplomacy prevented another Korean War.

We also see how the present day represents a nuclear turning point and what hope exists for our future. Rhodes 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, suggesting what might make it possible.

Powerful and persuasive, The Twilight of the Bombs is an essential work of contemporary history.

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Richard Rhodes is the author or editor of twenty-three books, including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in History. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford, Guggenheim, MacArthur, and Alfred P. Sloan foundations, among others. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, and a host and correspondent for the public television series Frontline and American Experience. He lectures frequently in the United States and abroad. He lives near Half Moon Bay, California.