The Books You Should Read About the Bomb

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Hundreds of lit torches cut the bitter cold on the streets of Oslo one night in December 2017.

I happened to be in the city when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and I found myself swept up in the procession that honors the prize’s winner every year.

ICAN campaigners greeted us from a balcony, but the mood was more mournful than joyous: North Korea was aggressively pursuing nuclear testing , and President Trump had responded by threatening to retaliate with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” For all of ICAN’s work, nuclear war felt closer than ever.

I thought back to that night while reading Scott W.

Stern’s Atlantic essay this week about Jon Else’s Frenchman Flat , a new book about, as Stern describes it, “the heroism and the absurdity of our atomic present and this Strangelovian, Lovecraftian thing we call ‘nuclear policy.’” First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic ’s Books section: A diagnosis for social conflict that gets lost along the way What comes after America A nation of strange, idle men Cormac McCarthy’s midlife crisis Since that night in Norway, the threat of nuclear war has only seemed to grow, thanks to events such as the war in Ukraine and the United States’ ongoing conflict with Iran, and heightened tension between India and Pakistan.

In August of last year, this magazine dedicated an issue to the subject.

Stern notes that “today, the famous Doomsday Clock, which measures the risk of nuclear cataclysm, is at just 85 seconds from midnight, the closest it’s been to Armageddon since the clock’s creation in 1947.” How might we avoid the disaster that has loomed in the world’s imagination for eight decades? Else doesn’t think that ICAN or similar groups hold the answer; he writes that getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether isn’t realistic.

Still, Frenchman Flat leads Stern to a powerful idea: The threat of these weapons encourages governments to practice secrecy, but avoiding annihilation might require the opposite—a push for greater transparency.

In building his argument, Stern references several other books in the rich literature on nuclear development.

In that spirit, I’d like to suggest some further reading too.

In a 2024 Atlantic article, Jared Sullivan recommended Dan Zak’s Almighty , which tells the story of, among other incidents, an anti-nuclear activist group breaking into a uranium-enrichment facility.