A history of the world’s most dangerous weapon
The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons, by Richard Rhodes. Knopf Doubleday, 2010. $27.95, 384 pp.
With The Making of the Atom Bomb, Richard Rhodes became America’s foremost nuclear historian, winning the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and a place among the best historians of the 20th century. He continued the saga of the nuclear age with the best- seller Dark Sun (1996) and Arsenals of Folly (2007).
The Twilight of the Bombs will probably not earn its predecessors’ high praise. However, it is clear that Rhodes did not intend it to. While Twilight is well-researched and informative, it is more a work of pop history than was the 900- page The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Twilight is Rhodes’ dramatic flourish. It reads like a murder mystery, a fast-paced and surprising story of illicit weapons development, international naiveté, and the haunting possibility of nuclear terrorism.
bNuclear Dentists
More than a third of the book is dedicated exclusively to the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, particularly the Iraqi program. Iran is omitted, perhaps because so much remains unknown about its nuclear weapons program.
The story of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is Rhodes’s most detailed and engaging. The author interviewed a number of politicians and personnel involved with the First Gulf War and the United Nation’s subsequent scramble to uncover Iraq’s nuclear development sites. Rhodes reveals that the success of the United Nation in uncovering Iraq’s duplicity was owed more to the individuals than the organization. The international team explicitly disobeyed official protocol to gain access to suspicious Iraqi nuclear sites. Rhodes reports that what the inspectors “wanted to demand of Iraq fell well outside IAEA custom,” but memorably quotes American diplomat Robert Gallucci: “We had a different view. … We were dentists… and we were about to pull some teeth.”
Cases and Anecdotes
Other chapters in Twilight address the Indian test bombings of the late 1990s, the construction of nuclear weapons in South Africa in the 1980s, and the dispersal of nuclear material associated with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Rhodes deftly relates the story of the 1991 August Putsch in the Soviet Union, during which fear spread worldwide that the USSR’s nuclear weapons had fallen into rebel hands. Rhodes claims that Mikhail Gorbachev himself probably initiated the rumor, even though the Soviet Union’s multi-layered system of nuclear control meant that such fears were unwarranted.
Still, Rhodes does not always achieve this high level of drama. Many portions of the book read like a mish-mash of anecdotes, with little explanation of how events relate to one another.
History and Modern Policy
One might also gripe that the author does not give readers much of a message for the future. Despite its ambitious subtitle, the book lacks much commentary on the prospect of eliminating nuclear weapons. A more complete account might have put the history of the 20th century to the service of an analysis of contemporary nuclear policy.
Instead, Rhodes closes his book with an intriguing discussion of how terrorists might harness the power of nuclear material. He highlights surprising findings from the scientific community. For instance, Rhodes quotes the Nobel-winning physicist Luis W. Alvarez, who said, “You can make a fairly high-level nuclear explosion just by dropping one piece [of highly enriched uranium] onto another by hand.”
This sort of speculation is frightening, but, given current concerns about emerging nuclear states and rogue actors, the absence of critical contemporary commentary is more than a little disappointing. Still, Rhodes’s history is brisk, and he at least provides a good starting point for such a discussion.
Paul Mathis ‘12 is a Staff Writer.