A lesson learned from THE NUCLEAR AGE: AN EPIC RACE FOR ARMS, POWER, AND SURVIVAL, by Serhii Plokhy

 Without international cooperation on nuclear weapons, we are all in a game of Russian Roulette (pun unintended).

    Few books can rivet my attention more so than histories of the evolution of bombs, and to that end there are few books I've read that are as fascinating and terrifying as Serhii Plokhy's terrific The Nuclear Age, which chronicles the history of both nuclear weapons and how we as a species have perceived them. While reading it, I was reminded of one of my favorite all-time works, Sven Lindquist's A History of Bombing. While Lindquist's book, with its bizarre "jump all over the timeline" structure, is pretty inaccessible to all but the most dedicated historians (I would know as one who's tried to make laypeople read it), Plokhy tells a much more accessible version of the story where humanity's inherently contradictory dreams of bringing peace to the world through superbombs reached its culmination with the development of weapons that haunt our nightmares to this day.

    As detailed in the recent Oppenheimer blockbuster, the atomic bomb was born out of America's terror that Nazi Germany would figure out how to unleash its power first, and that resulted in a massive government investment to beat them to the secret. Right away, the idea of the bomb as a peacemaker caused consternation to physicists who were deeply ambivalent about it being used primarily on Japanese civilians, and the explosion at Hiroshima triggered a global arms race that we have now spent nearly a century attempting to manage. One fascinating and controversial story Plokhy reveals in his book is how some of the scientists who smuggled the secret of the American bomb to the Soviet Union, were driven less by a fanatical Communism and more by a fear that an atomic-hoarding America could use the bomb to terrorize other countries into submitting to its agenda; instead, they hoped that both sides stockpiling the bomb would result in a more peaceful world terrified of unleashing the new atomic power. In a way, their predictions were darkly proven with the subsequent development of the hydrogen bomb, a truly apocalyptic weapon that made the idea of massive nuclear strikes absurd. I had long known how much the hydrogen bomb had terrified the world of the 1950's and the 1960's, but Plokhy points to America's Castle Bravo test in the middle of the Pacific as a true turning point; us inadvertently irradiating a large portion of the globe convinced many global leaders that any major nuclear war would be one no country could walk away from without suffering permanent and irreparable damage.

    Plokhy toward the end of the book makes the nerve-wracking argument that the world was actually more safe in the 1960's and 1970's--where everyone lived under the shadow of the hydrogen bomb--than it is today, where the general collapse of American and Russian prestige around the world is generated more of a free-for-all type of situation. The lesson smaller nations have taken away from the various invasions America and Russia have launched in recent decades, is that no country can ever be safe from military threat until it has developed a nuclear weapon. In addition, he points out the dangers of smaller-scale nuclear threats, such as how quickly nuclear power plants can be destabilized by hostile forces (both through conventional and tech attacks), and in the growing sense that one day a rogue power will see the use of "tactical" nuclear weapons (i.e. small-scale Hiroshima style bombs) as a legitimate wartime exercise, with the accompanying horrors that will inevitably bring.

    In the end, the main lesson Plokhy sells is that today's free-for-all of military belligerence, invasions, and a generally unstable world cannot continue, and the world is constantly under threat of a nuclear-style attack until international agreements can resume about the proper uses of nuclear energy. Current enemies such as America, Iran, Russia, India, Pakistan, etc., might find it incredibly difficult to sit down at the same tables and find room for basic agreements, but the costs of ignoring the current global situation might be far higher than the pride many of us will have to swallow. Whatever one believes about Plokhy's conclusions, The Nuclear Age is an essential read for anyone who is intrigued by the history of nuclear weapons, and how this issue continues to plague the modern world even as we've moved on to other potential dire threats.