The thesis of Rhodes’s latest nuclear narrative is both simple (nuclear war is dumb) and subtle (the big nuclear powers have preferred stalemate or defeat, in Vietnam and Afghanistan, to using the most lethal arms in their arsenals). “Is there,’’ he asks in the question that explains everything, “better evidence of the military uselessness of nuclear weapons than six decades of futility?’’
“The Twilight of the Bombs’’ is no manifesto, but Rhodes leads us slowly to the conclusion that nuclear disarmament, or at the very least wholesale destruction of nuclear arms, is the happy union of moral and military wisdom. He believes that within a generation or so, such weapons will be outlawed. “In time, possession of a nuclear weapon will be judged a crime against humanity,’’ he says. “Such a judgment would only codify what is already an evident fact.’’
Thus his title is both fact and wish. And this book, his 23d, explores the much-ignored terrain of wars that didn’t happen and crises that didn’t erupt along with comprehensive looks at the events that mark contemporary history. Here is perhaps the most approachable look at Iraq’s nuclear effort, a riveting account of the whereabouts of the Russian nuclear-weapons activization apparatus during the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, and a detailed examination of Sam Nunn’s crusade to account for the nearly 1,500 metric tons of nuclear materials and weapons of the former Soviet Union in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.
The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union had huge political and cultural effects, but its nuclear implications are, even now, vastly unacknowledged. Chief among them is the idea that, as Rhodes put it, “nuclear weapons, which men and nations had sworn were guardians of their survival during the Cold War, depleted to commodities in its aftermath.’’
