Overview

Humans have warred against one another since the being of time. Until recently, this tendency to wage war endangered hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people, but never our existence as a species. The advent of nuclear weapons, however, has changed the potential outcome of war. First envisioned simply as larger bombs, nuclear weapons ended World War II, precipitated a decades-long Cold War, and functioned as a precarious deterrent to a Third World War, while, at the same time, making all humanity fear its results. For decades, the nuclear club was limited to a handful of nations, but it expanded in the last part of the 1990s and is threatening to increase again. Paradoxically, while the end of the Cold War reduced the chance for global nuclear annihilation, it may have increased the risk of smaller-scale nuclear war between nations with recently acquired nuclear weapons...