An academic book editor once said to me that it usually means no good when a history book becomes timely. While publishers certainly hope that their books are widely read, unfortunately it is often an international crisis that makes the media, and a general audience, turn to history books for advice. In Europe, a new…
Tag: nuclear weapons
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 106: Lindee on Hamblin & Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible
This edited volume grew out of the National Science Foundation-supported Downwinders Project at Oregon State University (2017–2021), which created an oral history archive, encouraged the collection of other historical materials, and facilitated scholarship and reflection on the legacies of radiation exposures. The project brought together people with different standpoints and the papers collected here reflect…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-53 on Hymans, “The Bomb as God”
In a recent book, Vipin Narang listed twenty-nine states that had taken steps to acquire nuclear-weapon capabilities at one time or another.[1] Among them, nine completed the task by establishing extensive productive capacities, deploying nuclear forces, and engaging openly in nuclear deterrence and power plays. The other twenty had gone a distance, in some cases…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 104: Wellerstein on Wirtz & Larsen, eds., Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications
Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3) is a mouthful of military jargon. In this edited volume, which is presented as an “unclassified primer on America’s NC3 system and the way forward to a modernized, twenty-first-century backbone of deterrence,” one finds a bewildering number of attempts at defining what exactly NC3 is, and what it is…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-40 on Sarkar, Plougshares and Swords
India’s nuclear program has been a source of fascination for historians and political scientists for decades. Perhaps more than any other case, there are deep disagreements over what motivated India’s nuclear pursuits. For some, India’s nuclear program was driven in large part by domestic political concerns.[1] Others emphasize Indian leaders’ beliefs about national identity or…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Review Essay 95: Hymans on Potter, et al., Death Dust
The international security studies literature contains many thorough discussions of terrorists’ potential to acquire radiological “dirty bombs,” but it has mostly ignored the potential of states to do likewise.[1] Now, a crack team of nonproliferation experts led by the indefatigable William Potter has filled this gap in the literature with Death Dust, a fascinating comparative…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-36 on Higuchi, Political Fallout
Toshihiro Higuchi’s Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis has already been the subject of an H-Environment Roundtable Review (Vol. 11, no. 5, 2021). It is a testament to the interdisciplinary character of Higuchi’s book that it is now the subject of an H-Diplo Roundtable Review. The Partial Test…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-25 on Kaplow, Signing Away the Bomb
On 17 October 1958, Irish Foreign Minister Frank Aiken proposed a resolution at the United Nations (UN) that called on that body to explore ways to prevent the “further dissemination of nuclear weapons.”[1] After Aiken’s initial effort did not succeed, Ireland reintroduced variations of the resolution every year until the UN General Assembly, on 4…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-17 on Pelopidas, Repenser Les Choix Nucléaires
This important and well-researched book appears at a time when concern about nuclear weapons, which lapsed after the end of the Cold War, has resurfaced because of the war in Ukraine and anxieties over Iran. The recent film Oppenheimer gives eloquent expression to these fears, with the main character worrying that the development of the…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-11 on Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States
Alex Wellerstein’s Restricted Data is an extensive and impressive study of the organisational production of nuclear secrecy in the United States. The overarching rationale of Restricted Data is to trace the development of the political, social, and organisational mechanisms which limited the spread of the scientific and technical knowledge of the nuclear technology. The aim…