Twilight of the Bombs

The fourth and final volume in Richard Rhodes’s monumental and prizewinning history of nuclear weapons, offering the first comprehensive narrative of the challenges faced in a post-Cold War age. FIRST TIME IN PAPERBACK. VINTAGE.

The final volume in Richard Rhodes’s prizewinning history of nuclear weapons offers the first comprehensive narrative of the challenges faced in the post-Cold War age.

The past twenty years have transformed our relationship with nuclear weapons drastically. With extraordinary depth of knowledge and understanding, Richard Rhodes makes clear how the five original nuclear powers—Russia, Great Britain, France, China, and especially the United States—have struggled with new realities. He reveals the real reasons George W. Bush chose to fight a second war in Iraq, assesses the emerging threat of nuclear terrorism, and offers advice on how our complicated relationships with North Korea and South Asia should evolve. Finally, he imagines what a post-nuclear world might look like, as only he can.

Author Biography

Richard Rhodes is the author or editor of twenty-three books, including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Dark Sun- The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in History. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford, Guggenheim, MacArthur, and Alfred P. Sloan foundations, among others. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, and a host and correspondent for the public television series Frontline and American Experience. He lectures frequently in the United States and abroad. He lives near Half Moon Bay, California.