The best books on how we reduce the risk of nuclear war: from the Cold War to the present

I love this book because it explains complex matters in straightforward language. What is the purpose of arms control? Why do leaders agree to it? How did agreements come about? Why is reducing nuclear risk so difficult? You can answer those questions using elaborate theories and stultifying language, yet Tom Graham and Damien LaVera frame the texts of agreement with highly readable introductory essays.

Graham served for many years as the General Counsel of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and you can sense his passion for precision. “The START I Treaty, in its detailed complexity, is a lawyer’s dream,” they write in this book. There is so much about that 1991 agreement that blows my mind. START is not even in its name in the actual treaty. We call it START I only because of START II, which US and Russian leaders would later sign but would never enter into force. START Treaty is an example of RAS Syndrome (Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome—the T in START stands for Treaty).

The treaty’s definition of a warhead is not a warhead. And there are countless other peculiarities like that. However fragile, the basic START regime (through the 2010 New START agreement) has endured into the 2020s—though I would doubly underscore “fragile.”

I love this book because it tells the story of individuals working on a complicated and unprecedented problem. In December 1991, an independent Ukraine suddenly became the state with the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world. What should its leaders do? Forever after, political scientists have debated a question in the abstract: “Should Ukraine keep its nukes”?

After Russia’s partial invasion in 2014 and full-out invasion in 2022, the question was, “Should Ukraine have kept its nukes?” And Budjeryn does a fantastic job demonstrating how the reality was far more complicated than that framing. It was a messy path to the 1992 Lisbon Protocol and 1994 Budapest Memorandum, by which Ukraine joined the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 1991 START agreement.

Budjeryn focuses on the human element and an era of uncertainty. I commend this book to anyone who concludes from Russia’s brutality in Ukraine: this is a justification for more countries to build or keep nuclear arms. 

Togzhan Kassenova’s book tells the story of one of the overlooked crimes of the twentieth century: the Soviet Union’s assault on Kazakhstan through careless nuclear testing—this devasted generations of Kazakhs and other non-Russian people. Kassenova also shows the terrifying prospects of what the collapse of the Soviet Union could have entailed.

There were unexploded nuclear devices buried underground and unguarded highly-enriched uranium that very bad people wanted to acquire to build their own bombs. Motivated by its history as a nuclear playground, Kazakhstan contributed to one of the great miracles of our time: the non-proliferation of the massive Soviet nuclear stockpile (some 27,000 warheads at the end of the Cold War) throughout the 1990s. Policymakers rightly worry about states like Iran and North Korea—as they rightly worried about Libya and Iraq in the 1990s and early 2000s.

For the most part, the AQ Khan network—not the Soviet arsenal—made those fears real. It could have been much worse without some of the decisions Kassenova describes in her book. 

I recommend this book because it tells the inside story of what it is like to actually negotiate and get a nuclear arms accord ratified. The word “negotiate” means several things here. For Rose Gottemoeller—as with any head of a delegation—nearly everything required some form of negotiation.

At times I found myself thinking: one-on-one sessions with her hawkish Russian counterpart (Anatoly Antonov, who is currently the Russian Ambassador to the United States) must have been the most pleasant part of the whole ordeal. In that setting, at least you know where the other side stands. There is also mutual empathy between the top negotiators regarding bureaucratic turf wars and demands from on high—such as “get this done by X date.”

Previous nuclear agreements came about during a time of relative political consensus—when President Barack Obama sent Gottemoeller to Capital Hill to generate support for New START after he signed it in Prague in April 2010, it was the early days of the country’s current era of ill feelings. 

Love is probably not the term I would use for this book. I am glad that Annie Jacobsen wrote it, and I think anyone interested in the real threat of nuclear war should read it. There are moments in it—particularly one very consequential decision that the U.S. president makes—that are highly implausible and have generated criticism from people who have devoted their careers to nuclear deterrence.

However, it is worth noting that no one actually knows how the leader of a nuclear-armed state would react to the news of an incoming nuclear attack because that scenario has never happened before. I think it is worth emphasizing this book’s subtitle: “A Scenario”—which is not “The Scenario” or “All Scenarios.” There are many scenarios that do not end as definitively as in Jacobsen’s scenario.

I include this book in the topic of reducing the risk of nuclear war because it so vividly shows what can—not necessarily will—go wrong amidst the failure of deterrence as well as agreements to limit and reduce nuclear arms as well as the risks of miscommunications and accidents associated with them.