The Future That Never Came

Half a century ago, World War II ended in two blazing flashes of heat, light, and devastation. The radioactive clouds that rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on those two fateful days in August 1945 cast a dark shadow over what historian John Lewis Gaddis has called "the long peace" that followed. Within seven years, the United States tested a fusion device 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic explosive that flattened Hiroshima and killed more than 100,000 Japanese. By then, the Soviet Union also possessed its own atomic bomb and would soon explode a thermonuclear bomb. It seemed a foregone conclusion that many other countries, in the quest for national security and international military and technological prestige, would seek and, inevitably, obtain nuclear weapons.