Mr. Plokhy examines the range of successful nuclear proliferators, from India and Pakistan to Israel, Iran and North Korea ... Mr. Plokhy has written a useful history of how we reached the present; he reminds us why each ‘next new thing’… should not distract us from the continuing existential need to deal with the power of the sun’s nearest relatives here on earth.
Both a history of nuclear armament and a homily to its dangers ... Panoramic in scope and fastidious in detail ... Plokhy…makes his case convincingly, and the chronology bears him out ... Perfectly timed, compelling and essential ... Reminds us that the spectre of nuclear extinction is not a cold war nightmare but a permanent condition of modern life.
Sombre ... Plokhy provides a solid narrative account ... Plokhy’s account of proliferation may be less familiar ... An encyclopaedic survey of proliferation, and essential reading for anyone who wants to know how we got to where we are. But there are disappointments in the way Plokhy has approached his subject. There is almost nothing on how the weapons might be deployed, what nuclear strategy means for the states that possess them, or how nuclear capability melds with the existence of conventional forces, which are the ones regularly deployed over the past 80 years ... Plokhy might have made much more of the initiatives launched from Japan to internationalise the protest against the bomb.
