Rajat Narang
'In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button (to launch nukes). Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on and uninhabited planet.' ― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany.From their genesis with the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s at a whopping cost of $2 billion by harnessing the immense power of the atom, which is almost 100 million times more powerful than typical chemical reactions; nuclear weapons subsequently became the core protagonists of the ensuing Cold War between both the superpowers with nuclear deterrence & MAD forming the bedrock of their decades-long ideological conflict and quest for one-upmanship & global influence for decades to come.The Cold War also witnessed the mass production of nuclear weapons with almost 70,000+ nukes produced collectively with the probability of their accidental launch, a tactical miscalculation or madman’s madness triggering an all-out nuclear war staying a very realistic & highly probabilistic possibility throughout the course of the Cold War and even today.This effort takes-off at the very dawn of the atomic age and longitudinally chronicles & unravels as to how the benevolent promise of harnessing the power of the atom for the development a super weapon to end all wars during WWII; instead, became a forever curse, almost as a Frankenstein, and a Gordian knot for mankind. Leveraging the latest, declassified documents from the era and an interdisciplinary approach spanning nuclear science, geopolitics, Aerospace & Defense (A&D) and diplomacy; it analyses the evolutionary trajectory of nuclear weapons globally through the course of the Cold War from a single nuclear superpower to almost 6 nuclear powers by the end of Cold War in 1991.Ultimately, it underscores as to how the first nuclear age through the Cold War, came at a staggering financial, human & environmental cost to mankind, besides posing a forever existential threat. Lastly, the U.S. nuclear weapons program alone is estimated to have come at the cost of a whopping $5.7 trillion to the American taxpayers over the span of half-a-century, from 1941 to 1991, while having also caused prolonged, serious & permanent damage to the environment as well as human settlements as its lasting & forever legacy.The long forgotten nuclear saga and its painful, yet unlearned, lessons need a definite revisit amid the outbreak of another, massive nuclear renaissance globally now in the 21st century and the return of the Nuclear Sword of Damocles to the fore with the world having collectively spent $119 billion on nuclear modernization for 2025 alone, and $471 billion over the course of 2021-2025, driven by another 3-way nuclear arms race which is underway globally now between the U.S., Russia and China without a realization of the ultimate reality perfectly captured by the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev with his quote below...'The survivors (of a nuclear war) would envy the dead.' - Nikita Khrushchev, Former Soviet Premier
