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The Nuclear Age
  • Published: 21 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241582862
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $55.00

The Nuclear Age

An Epic Race for Arms, Power and Survival

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
28 Oct 2025
EBook
21 Oct 2025
Audiobook
21 Oct 2025
Hardback
21 Nov 2025
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From the best-selling author of Chernobyl comes a sweeping history of the geopolitics behind the nuclear arms race, from the first atomic bomb to today

On 16 July 1945, the Nuclear Age began with the explosion of the first atomic bomb and the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer: 'Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.'

While the threat of mutually assured destruction kept a lid on a simmering and tense geopolitical landscape, events like the Chernobyl disaster and near-misses like the Cuban Missile Crisis showed that total destruction was only ever one malfunction, mistake, or miscommunication away. Now, as governments re-arm their nuclear arsenals, treaties designed to limit the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons fall away, and nuclear weapons come increasingly within reach of non-state actors, we are on the brink of a renaissance of the nuclear industry.

In The Nuclear Age, acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy paints an intricate picture of a world governed by fear. From the first artificial splitting of the atom in 1917 and the race to create the first atomic bomb in World War II, through the fraught arms race of the Cold War, to the imperialism, neo-colonial motivation and wars being waged today, the threat posed by nuclear weapons is as pertinent as ever.

As he examines the motivations of key players, Plokhy confronts the crucial question of our age: what can we learn from the first nuclear arms race that can help us to stop the new one?
  • Published: 21 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241582862
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $55.00
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About the author

Serhii Plokhy

Serhii Plokhy is Professor of History at Harvard University and a leading authority on the Cold War and nuclear history. His books include the Baillie Gifford award-winner Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, Nuclear Folly, The Gates of Europe and The Last Empire.

SP

Also by Serhii Plokhy

Chernobyl Roulette
The Russo-Ukrainian War
Atoms and Ashes
Nuclear Folly
Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front
Chernobyl
Lost Kingdom
See all

Praise for The Nuclear Age

Serhii Plokhy’s alarming warning in The Nuclear Age evokes a range of visceral responses. The first is deep memory. For readers who lived through the last 50 years, Plokhy’s narrative will resonate as the terrifying, then hopeful, backdrop to our lives... It also provokes deep anger at those whose recklessness and absence of conscience have constituted a crime against creation

Irish Times

The Nuclear Age is an encyclopaedic survey of proliferation, and essential reading for anyone who wants to know how we got to where we are

Daily Telegraph

Panoramic in scope and fastidious in detail... Plokhy's perfectly timed, compelling and essential book reminds us that the spectre of nuclear extinction is not a cold war nightmare but a permanent condition of modern life

Financial Times

Few historians write with Serhii Plokhy’s authority, clarity or global vision. The Nuclear Age is not only the definitive account of how nuclear power and peril have shaped the modern world, but a profound warning about the risks we still face. This is essential reading, and a marvellous book

Peter Frankopan
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