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

Richard Rhodes
Narrator: Robertson Dean

In his fourth title in a series initiated by the definitive The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), Rhodes chronicles most but not all major developments related to nuclear weaponry since the cold war ended. Impassioned by his conviction that the atomic bomb confers an illusory sense of security and poses so dire a hazard to humanity that it must be abolished, Rhodes writes journalistically rather than in the more historical manner that characterized this book’s important and widely read predecessors. He interviews politicians, diplomats, and technicians involved in nuclear disarmament over the past two decades and explains such activities as inspections of sites or negotiations of significant international accords such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and agreements between the U.S. and Russia to safeguard nuclear weapons and fissile material. After an interlude about the South African bomb, Rhodes narrates crises with a nuclear angle that were actually or potentially a peril to people at large, namely the Gulf War of 1990–91, the Pakistan/India test explosions of 1998, the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and North Korea’s nuclear weapons. Yet Rhodes’ discussion of the latter is curiously incomplete, relating nothing (beyond blame-Bush aspersions) about how the so-called Agreed Framework brokered by Jimmy Carter in 1994 fell apart under North Korean prevarication and deception. And conspicuously absent from this book is the dangerous nuclear crisis of the moment: Iran. Regardless of omissions, Rhodes’ formidable nuclear knowledge, readably presented, will convey his moral opposition to nuclear deterrence to a sizable audience.

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