Two Views of Cassandra: Lawrence Badash, A Nuclear Winter's Tale John Mueller, Atomic Obsession

The end of the cold war and the end of the threat of all-out nuclear war between the superpowers have made the field of nuclear technology studies less relevant. Thermonuclear war and the threat of global destruction framed scholarship in the history of nuclear technology, as proponents and opponents of deterrence crossed swords in books and on the pages of academic and policy journals. The world has changed, and with it the context for nuclear scholarship. Those who study and write about nuclear technology need to find new ways of drawing interest and readers to their field, which is in danger of becoming like many fields in the history of technology, a study of an ancient past. The two books under review both bring nuclear scholarship into the present, where the images of falling towers and melting ice caps are more relevant than that of a mushroom cloud.