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The Nuclear Age: An Epic Race for Arms, Power and Survival
On 16 July 1945, the Nuclear Age began with the explosion of the first atomic bomb and the words of J. Robert “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”
While the threat of mutually assured destruction kept a lid on a simmering and tense geopolitical landscape, events like the Chernobyl disaster and near-misses like the Cuban Missile Crisis showed that total destruction was only ever one malfunction, mistake, or miscommunication away. Now, as governments re-arm their nuclear arsenals, treaties designed to limit the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons fall away, and nuclear weapons come increasingly within reach of non-state actors, we are on the brink of a renaissance of the nuclear industry. 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.
In The Nuclear Age, acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy paints an intricate picture of a world governed by fear. From the first artificial splitting of the atom in 1917 and the race to create the first atomic bomb in World War II, through the fraught arms race of the Cold War, to the imperialism, neo-colonial motivation and wars being waged today, the threat posed by nuclear weapons is pertinent as ever.
In this thrilling global history of nuclear arms, Plokhy examines the motivations of key players and confronts the crucial question of our what can we can learn from the first nuclear arms race that can help us to stop the new one?
While the threat of mutually assured destruction kept a lid on a simmering and tense geopolitical landscape, events like the Chernobyl disaster and near-misses like the Cuban Missile Crisis showed that total destruction was only ever one malfunction, mistake, or miscommunication away. Now, as governments re-arm their nuclear arsenals, treaties designed to limit the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons fall away, and nuclear weapons come increasingly within reach of non-state actors, we are on the brink of a renaissance of the nuclear industry. 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.
In The Nuclear Age, acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy paints an intricate picture of a world governed by fear. From the first artificial splitting of the atom in 1917 and the race to create the first atomic bomb in World War II, through the fraught arms race of the Cold War, to the imperialism, neo-colonial motivation and wars being waged today, the threat posed by nuclear weapons is pertinent as ever.
In this thrilling global history of nuclear arms, Plokhy examines the motivations of key players and confronts the crucial question of our what can we can learn from the first nuclear arms race that can help us to stop the new one?
432 pages, Hardcover
First published October 21, 2025
18 people are currently reading
422 people want to read
About the author
Serhii Plokhy
47 books954 followersSerhii Plokhy is a Ukrainian and American historian. Plokhy is currently the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, where he was also named Walter Channing Cabot Fellow in 2013. A leading authority on Eastern Europe, he has lived and taught in Ukraine, Canada, and the United States. He has published extensively in English, Ukrainian, and Russian. For three successive years (2002-2005) his books won first prize of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies.
For his Ukrainian-language profile, please see: Сергій Плохій
For his Ukrainian-language profile, please see: Сергій Плохій
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 2, 2026
The moral question of the bomb
An interesting overview of how nuclear weapons shaped the modern world, not only militairy but also politically and culturally. Rather than a technological description of the bomb itself, it is a description of power, fear and moral responsibility.
After Horishima and Nagasaki humankind acquired the capacity for destruction on a planetary scale which became a permanent feauture of international politics
Ofcourse most of the attention is given to the two Cold War adversaries, where Plokhy shows that the threat of mutual assured destruction (MAD) shaped their politics and created a fragile form of stability.
But Plokhy goes beyond the two superpowers and shows how Britain, France, China, India and Pakistan (and Israel) have reshaped the political order and the danger of a regional conflict going nuclaer.
The central theme is a moral question: how do people live in a world knowing that that world can be destroyed by a conflict, or simply by someone pushing the wrong button?
Perhaps this question will become a more poignant one in today's world, where the power is shifting towards a more plural form of superpowers. In that way the moral question becomes ever more important. After all those years, we still haven't found the answer.
An interesting overview of how nuclear weapons shaped the modern world, not only militairy but also politically and culturally. Rather than a technological description of the bomb itself, it is a description of power, fear and moral responsibility.
After Horishima and Nagasaki humankind acquired the capacity for destruction on a planetary scale which became a permanent feauture of international politics
Ofcourse most of the attention is given to the two Cold War adversaries, where Plokhy shows that the threat of mutual assured destruction (MAD) shaped their politics and created a fragile form of stability.
But Plokhy goes beyond the two superpowers and shows how Britain, France, China, India and Pakistan (and Israel) have reshaped the political order and the danger of a regional conflict going nuclaer.
The central theme is a moral question: how do people live in a world knowing that that world can be destroyed by a conflict, or simply by someone pushing the wrong button?
Perhaps this question will become a more poignant one in today's world, where the power is shifting towards a more plural form of superpowers. In that way the moral question becomes ever more important. After all those years, we still haven't found the answer.
December 11, 2025
A timely and concise overview on the history and future of nuclear weapons.
December 17, 2025
Timely and interesting book that discusses nuclear diplomacy and geopolitics from the beginning to the present day.
December 11, 2025
Growing up as I did in the 1980's, the threat of nuclear war and Global annihilation was an ever-present and very real threat, something difficult to elaborate to those growing up 20 years later as the threat receded after the end of the cold war and with the arms control treaties and denuclearization of the 1990's. The Ukraine war has now though put the threat of nuclear weapons back center stage, and we are now closer to nuclear war than at any time since the height of the cold war. From day 1 of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the new world order that it ushered in, Putin has threatened the use of nuclear weapons. Besides his threats, other ominous signs are building - treaties allowed to lapse, the US resuming testing, China building up its arsenal. New states are considering going down the nuclear road including Saudi Arabia, South Korea and even Japan, Germany and Poland. Then there is the ever-present and growing risk from non-state actors against whom nuclear deterrence does not work. Even popular entertainment again features the horror of nuclear confrontation as in the recent Netflix hit House of Dynamite, almost as impactful as 1983's The day after.
Serhii Plokhy, professor of history at Harvard addresses 2 main questions in the contemporary context, namely 1) what lessons can we learn from the first nuclear arms race as we enter the second; and 2) what factors motivate states to go nuclear - mostly and overwhelmingly, it is fear. Fear, after all, rather than aggression, is why most wars in human history have been preemptively started. Plokhy examines, state by state, why each of the nuclear armed states went nuclear originally. Britain and France to maintain a semblance of their great power status ("France cannot be France without greatness"); the Soviets for ideological reasons (and fear), an expansion of Communism in Imperial traditions; China for deterrence and security; Israel out of anxiety and security; India initially to harness the economic benefits of nuclear energy; Pakistan out of fear of India and North Korea out of fear and for national pride.
Plokhy begins with an exhaustive history of the race to build the atomic bomb during World War 2 through to the dawn of the nuclear age, as early post WW2 attempts at nuclear arms control gave way to the concept of deterrence or balance of terror. He moves from MAD to the Strategic Defence Initiative (Star Wars) which dangerously undermined the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, the element widely believed to have prevented the cold war from ever turning hot. He doesn't spend any time exploring the terrifying near misses and accidents, skipping over for example the Able Archer incident of 1983 in one paragraph, widely believed to be the closest the world ever came to an accidental nuclear war. Plokhy chooses not to explore the angle that the fear of confrontation between the nuclear armed states instead led to endless proxy conventional wars in South East Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.
The authors' style is factual, scientific - deeply knowledgeable if not grippingly entertaining, building on his previous works on nuclear topics which have included books on Chernobyl and the Cuban missiles crisis. He brings us up to the present day with, unsurprisingly, Ukraine, something dear to his heart being Ukrainian himself. He reminds us that Ukraine is a nation that voluntarily gave up nuclear weapons, having emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the World's 3rd ranking nuclear armed state. This fact is amazingly rarely mentioned in the media or political commentary on the war in Ukraine today.
Plokhy depressingly concludes that because of Russia's war in Ukraine, the largest conflict in Europe since the end of World War 2, the World is riper now for nuclear proliferation than at any time since the end of the cold war, and is in as dangerous a place as we've been at any time since the 1980's. This history of the nuclear age refuses to be just a history.
Serhii Plokhy, professor of history at Harvard addresses 2 main questions in the contemporary context, namely 1) what lessons can we learn from the first nuclear arms race as we enter the second; and 2) what factors motivate states to go nuclear - mostly and overwhelmingly, it is fear. Fear, after all, rather than aggression, is why most wars in human history have been preemptively started. Plokhy examines, state by state, why each of the nuclear armed states went nuclear originally. Britain and France to maintain a semblance of their great power status ("France cannot be France without greatness"); the Soviets for ideological reasons (and fear), an expansion of Communism in Imperial traditions; China for deterrence and security; Israel out of anxiety and security; India initially to harness the economic benefits of nuclear energy; Pakistan out of fear of India and North Korea out of fear and for national pride.
Plokhy begins with an exhaustive history of the race to build the atomic bomb during World War 2 through to the dawn of the nuclear age, as early post WW2 attempts at nuclear arms control gave way to the concept of deterrence or balance of terror. He moves from MAD to the Strategic Defence Initiative (Star Wars) which dangerously undermined the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, the element widely believed to have prevented the cold war from ever turning hot. He doesn't spend any time exploring the terrifying near misses and accidents, skipping over for example the Able Archer incident of 1983 in one paragraph, widely believed to be the closest the world ever came to an accidental nuclear war. Plokhy chooses not to explore the angle that the fear of confrontation between the nuclear armed states instead led to endless proxy conventional wars in South East Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.
The authors' style is factual, scientific - deeply knowledgeable if not grippingly entertaining, building on his previous works on nuclear topics which have included books on Chernobyl and the Cuban missiles crisis. He brings us up to the present day with, unsurprisingly, Ukraine, something dear to his heart being Ukrainian himself. He reminds us that Ukraine is a nation that voluntarily gave up nuclear weapons, having emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as the World's 3rd ranking nuclear armed state. This fact is amazingly rarely mentioned in the media or political commentary on the war in Ukraine today.
Plokhy depressingly concludes that because of Russia's war in Ukraine, the largest conflict in Europe since the end of World War 2, the World is riper now for nuclear proliferation than at any time since the end of the cold war, and is in as dangerous a place as we've been at any time since the 1980's. This history of the nuclear age refuses to be just a history.
November 22, 2025
After listening to Plokhy on the podcast, The Rachham Review, I thought I would give this a try. Great and fascinating storytelling of the history of the nuclear age.
December 12, 2025
The most frightening and depressing book I have ever read. Typographical errors on pages 56 and 57 (Uranium isotope names are incorrect in a couple of places) need to be fixed in the next edition.
January 8, 2026
What a great and not at all terrifying time to be reading a comprehensive history of nuclear weapons :—)
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews