The Twilight of the Bombs recent challenges, new dangers, and the prospects for a world without nuclear weapons
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.
HistoryMilitaryNuclear WarfareWeaponsPolitical ScienceInternational Relations
RELEASED2010
PUBLISHERAlfred A. Knopf
LENGTH366
LANGUAGEEN
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Richard Rhodes was born in Kansas City, Kansas. After graduating with honors from Yale in 1959, he worked for Hallmark Cards and was a contributing editor for Harper’s and Playboy magazines. He is the author of more than fifty articles, and ten books, including Looking for America: A Writer’s Odyssey (1979); Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey (1993); Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey Through Polynesia (1995); How to Write: Advice and Reflections (1996); the acclaimed The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague (1997); and Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (2002). Rhodes’s ability to cut through to the essentials and follow an action from its onset to its completion is clearly seen in "Watching the Animals" (1970), an absorbing and realistic account of the processing of pigs into foodstuffs by the I-D Packing Company of Des Moines, Iowa. [Source][1] [1]: http://wps.prenhall.com/hss_hirschberg_millennium_4/29/7554/1933854.cw/index.html
The Twilight of the Bombs recent challenges, new dangers, and the prospects for a world without nuclear weapons
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.
HistoryMilitaryNuclear WarfareWeaponsPolitical ScienceInternational RelationsArms ControlTerrorism
RELEASED2010
PUBLISHERAlfred A. Knopf
LENGTH366
LANGUAGEEN
Richard Rhodes was born in Kansas City, Kansas. After graduating with honors from Yale in 1959, he worked for Hallmark Cards and was a contributing editor for Harper’s and Playboy magazines. He is the author of more than fifty articles, and ten books, including Looking for America: A Writer’s Odyssey (1979); Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey (1993); Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey Through Polynesia (1995); How to Write: Advice and Reflections (1996); the acclaimed The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague (1997); and Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (2002). Rhodes’s ability to cut through to the essentials and follow an action from its onset to its completion is clearly seen in "Watching the Animals" (1970), an absorbing and realistic account of the processing of pigs into foodstuffs by the I-D Packing Company of Des Moines, Iowa. [Source][1] [1]: http://wps.prenhall.com/hss_hirschberg_millennium_4/29/7554/1933854.cw/index.html
