Nuclear weapons have not been used in anger since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Yet even after the Cold War, the Bomb is still the greatest threat facing humankind. As President Bill Clinton's first secretary of defence, Les Aspin, put it: 'The Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is no more. But the post-Cold War world is decidedly not post-nuclear'. For all the efforts to reduce nuclear stockpiles,

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"The definitive guide to the history of nuclear arms control by a wise eavesdropper and masterful storyteller, Michael Krepon. The greatest unacknowledged diplomatic achievement of the Cold War was the absence of mushroom clouds. Deterrence alone was too dangerous to succeed; it needed arms control to prevent nuclear warfare. So, U.S. and Soviet leaders ventured into the unknown to devise guardrails for nuclear arms control and to treat the Bomb differently...

"Rose Gottemoeller, the US chief negotiator of the New START treaty-and the first woman to lead a major nuclear arms negotiation-delivers in this book an invaluable insider's account of the negotiations between the US and Russian delegations in Geneva in 2009 and 2010. It also examines the crucially important discussions about the treaty between President Barack Obama and President Dmitry Medvedev, and it describes the tough negotiations Gottemoeller...

"Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fred Kaplan takes us into the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs of Staff's "Tank" in the Pentagon, and the vast chambers of Strategic Command in Omaha to bring us the untold stories--based on exclusive interviews and previously classified documents--of how America's presidents and generals have thought about, threatened, broached, and, in some cases, just barely avoided nuclear war from the dawn of the...

"This story of the virus that destroyed Iran's nuclear centrifuges ... shows that the door has been opened on a new age of warfare, one in which a digital attack can have the same destructive capability as a megaton bomb dropped from an airplane"--

"The justification for the atomic bomb was simple: it would defeat Hitler and end the Second World War faster, saving lives. The reality was different. [This book] dismantles the conventional story of why the atom bomb was built. Peter Watson has found new documents showing that long before the Allied bomb was operational, it was clear that Germany had no atomic weapons of its own and was not likely to. The British knew this, but didn't share their...

The New Era in U.S. National Security focuses on the emerging threats of the second decade of the 21st century, well after 9/11, and well into the age of globalization. It is a thorough, technically competent, survey of the current arena of conflict and the competition for political and economic control by state and non-state actors. Starting with the current national security establishment, it discusses the incompatibility between the threats and...