The nuclear age came into existence with the explosion of the first atomic bomb in the New
Mexico desert on July 16 1945. The inauguration of this new era was epitomized 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 explores why governments have acquired and stockpiled nuclear weapons and reveals
the global failure to reach meaningful nuclear arms treaties. Plokhy shows how since the Cuban
missile crisis of 1962 the risk of nuclear war has never been so high: Russia threatens
nuclear aggression in its war on Ukraine China is constructing hundreds of new missile silos
and India and Pakistan are locked in ongoing nuclear competition. Plokhy also examines how more
countries than ever have come within perilous reach of acquiring nuclear arms while new
technologies such as hypersonic missiles and artificial intelligence make the nuclear
landscape increasingly unpredictable. From Hiroshima Nagasaki and the Castle Bravo test of
1954 to the rapidly developing nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran The Nuclear Age
reveals the fear that governs the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Plokhy profiles the global
players who have diagnosed stoked and influenced this fear from H. G. Wells to Nikita
Khrushchev and Vladimir Putin and he outlines what we might learn from our past to control
today's arms race. As the danger of nuclear war remains imminent The Nuclear Age diagnoses our
era of rearmament.
