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Joseph Cirincione, Bomb Scare. The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons (With A New Afterword); New York, Columbia University Press, 2008
The author is the president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation concentrating on nuclear weapons issues, and teaches at the Geogretown University School of Foreign Service. He has served as a senior vice president for national security at the Center for American Progress, the director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and on the professional staff of the Armed Services Committee in the US House of Representatives.
The book was edited for the first time in 2007, but the international context and the internal evolution of American politics determined the author to add a new part in the bok in 2008. This new part is the afterword, which presents the future possibilities of nuclear disarmament. The prospect for future development was influenced by US domestic political landscape's changing - which was forecasted by Dominique Moisi from the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), which had written an article regarding the possible election of a candidate of hope instead of a candidate of fear.1 The same prestigious publication presented a possible path to follow in order to arrive to a world without nuclear weapons.2 But already in January 2007 a bipartisan appeal was made in US regarding possible elimination of nuclear weapons: Republicans George Schultz and Henry Kissinger and Democrats William Perry and Sam Nunn wrote an article for Wall Street Journl, with the title "A World Free of Nuclear Weapons"; again,in January 15, 2008 the four published a new article announcing that their initiative had garnered support of the former secretaries of state secretaries of defense and national security advisers. As we can observe, the Cirincione's book appear in this optimistic landscape.
The book has eight chapters, and at the end of the book, there is the afterword, focalized upon the possible shaping of things to come in the nuclear era. As the first three chapters are focalized upon the history of nuclear weapon's development, and upon evolution of nuclear armaments, chapter five presents today's nuclear world. After that there is presented the new US policy regarding nuclear arsenals, with some optimistic views about proliferation and solution for this...