NUCLEAR WEAPONS

A world of dangers.

This comprehensive history meticulously details the process that keeps the nuclear balance in place and has prevented world annihilation. A Stanford University historian and author of Stalin and the Bomb (1994), Holloway has examined mountains of documents (the citation list runs more than 100 pages) beginning in the 1940s, before the first and only use of nuclear weapons, to the present day. While nuclear weapons have not been used in war since 1945, the threat of their deployment has shaped military history and international politics for decades. At the end of World War II, only one country, the U.S., possessed nuclear weapons; today, there are nine countries known to have them, with a global stockpile of about 13,000 weapons in various hands. That number is down from a peak of roughly 60,000 weapons, thanks to treaties. Holloway takes readers through brinksmanship (the Cuban missile crisis), resolution (President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev), global antinuclear movements, nonproliferation agreements, deterrence, strategic defense, and nuclear saber-rattling. From atomic weapons’ earliest days, it was clear that international control over their development, deployment, and use would be unlikely, if not impossible, because the policies and actions of individual countries would prevail in any situation. Leaders around the world saw and continue to see the atomic bomb not merely as a military weapon, but as an important source of political influence. Maintaining the delicate nuclear balance has so far been achieved by the “unacceptability of nuclear war”—the “nuclear taboo.” Holloway stresses that a nuclear war is unwinnable. “Nuclear-weapon states have made threats to use nuclear weapons, but is it not transgressive to advocate violating a taboo? Is that permissible as part of deterrence, which allows us to threaten terrible things in order not to have to carry them out?”

An impressive survey that takes stock of unimaginable peril.