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

The history of nuclear weapons is a short and turbulent one. In just 73 years of nuclear history, the world has seen the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the doomsday standoff of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the frantic stockpiling of weapons between the US and USSR that almost literally ended the world as we know it. The Cold War was the Golden Age of nuclear weapons and led to the definition of a nuclear program as a status symbol. Although the Cold War is long over, international nuclear policy remains frozen in its antiquated grip and focuses on regulating nuclear weapons rather than getting rid of them. In The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author Richard Rhodes addresses the following question: given the collective memory of going to bed uncertain that the world would still be there in the morning, why do we still rely on weapons that can end civilizations in seconds? In his book, Rhodes examines, “how the dangerous post-Cold War transition was managed, who its heroes were, what we learned from it, and where it carried us” (Rhodes 2011,9). Interestingly, Rhodes is not a nuclear scientist or scholar of any kind, which works to the lay reader’s advantage with a topic as technical as nuclear weapons proliferation. He uses his background as a journalist to weave a thoroughly researched and entertaining tale of the post-Cold War conflicts involving nuclear weapons, which is told largely through first person accounts of the major players themselves. The book is broken into four parts. Part I details the beginning of Iraq’s secret nuclear program in the early 1990’s and the attempts of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the newly formed United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) to uncover and regulate it. Part II chronicles the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the quandary of how to secure one nuclear arsenal split into four. Part III tells the story of South Africa, the only country in history to voluntarily give up their nuclear program, as well as how Jimmy Carter likely prevented a second Korean War. Part IV deals with more recent events including George W. Bush’s conflicts with Saddam Hussein’s ghost nuclear program and the subsequent invasion of Iraq, the current state of the US nuclear arsenal, the likelihood of a nuclear terrorist attack, and a compelling argument for total disarmament in the future.