The New Nuclear Arms Race

Harvard’s Serhii Plokhy confronts the critical question of our age: what can we learn from the first nuclear arms race to stop the new one?

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 geopolitical landscape, events like the Chernobyl disaster and near-misses like the Cuban Missile Crisis showed that total destruction was only ever one malfunction 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.

Harvard Professor and world-leading authority on the history of nuclear science Serhii Plokhy returns to How To Academy to paint an intricate picture of a world governed by fear. We may soon see as many as forty additional nuclear-armed countries in the world, about five times as many as there are today. Yet the world has not fully recognized this new threat. Can we enhance the instinct of self-preservation shared by friends and foes alike to save the world once again?

This event is presented in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute London.