A sweeping history of the geopolitics behind the nuclear arms race, from the first atomic bomb to today’s rush to stockpile nuclear weapons.

The nuclear age came into existence with the explosion of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. The era’s inauguration was answered by the bomb’s principal creator, J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Since then, the era of the atom has become the age of the bomb—or two bombs: atomic and hydrogen.

In The Nuclear Age, Serhii Plokhy, one of our preeminent Cold War historians, reveals the global failure to reach meaningful nuclear arms treaties and explores why governments acquire and stockpile nuclear weapons. Today, Russia, China, and North Korea threaten nuclear aggression; India and Pakistan are locked in ongoing nuclear competition; and more countries than ever—such as Iran—have come within perilous reach of acquiring nuclear arms. The Nuclear Age exposes the fear that governs our era of rearmament as the danger of nuclear war remains imminent.

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