For many decades after World War II, fears of nuclear war eclipsed all other fears, including overpopulation, climate change, and asteroids. Thousands of Hollywood movies, documentaries, and books raised the alarm. Images of devastation from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and deathly images of mushroom clouds from thermonuclear tests in the South Pacific and the Western United States made nuclear apocalypse seem like a probable outcome of continuing human progress.

And yet the nuclear apocalypse never arrived. The United States and Russia have reduced their nuclear arsenals. The number of nuclear-armed nations grew only to nine, which is a fraction of the dozens of nations President John F. Kennedy and others in the foreign policy establishment had feared in the early 1960s. “The atomic bomb was designed to bomb the world to peace,” said Marco Visscher, the author of a dazzling new book, The Power of Nuclear. “Not to pieces, but to peace. Deterrence seems to have worked fairly well. We should be honest that this nuclear war that many people expected in the 1960s didn't come about.”