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

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Sep 6, 2011 - Political Science - 480 pages
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.
 

Contents

A Different Country
3
PART ONE FOLLOWING THE CALUTRON TRAIL
13
President Bushs Frankenstein
15
Cutting Saddams Sinews
36
True Courage
56
Following the Calutron Trail
74
PART TWO BREAKDOWN AND REFORMATION
103
The Little Suitcase
105
Leaving the Laager
198
A Million and a Trillion
220
Great Leaders
252
The Cornerstone of Peace and Stability
267
The Dog Ate My Homework
293
Regime Change
321
The Hard Stare into the Abyss
334
The Twilight of the Bombs
360

Many Little Monsters
123
Waiting for Forty Years
150
PART THREE COMING IN FROM THE COLD
177
Preventive Defense
179
Notes
387
Acknowledgments
437
Index
443
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About the author (2011)

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.

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