Book Talk with David Holloway - Nuclear Weapons: An International History

About this Event

This book explores the history of nuclear weapons from the discovery of nuclear fission at the end of 1938 to Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech to the United Nations in December 1988. I attempted an international history, for two reasons. First, a great deal has been written about U.S. policy, much less about the other nuclear superpower. I use newly available Russian sources including archives, interviews, and memoirs, to examine the Soviet Union not merely as a threat and a target, but as an actor with its own nuclear program and its own ideas and goals. Key elements of nuclear history – arms racing, deterrence, crises, arms control, and above all the danger of nuclear war – necessarily involve, in one way or another, more than one country, more than one actor. That is why…

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