Life in a Nuclear-Armed World

In 1945 President Harry Truman was told the US was building "the most terrible weapon ever known in human history," one by which "modern civilization might be completely destroyed." This class explores how the US became the first country to make nuclear weapons and the only one to use them in war, how and why the bomb has spread to a few other countries and been rejected by the rest, and the new nuclear arms race with China and Russia. It unpacks the often hidden political, social, economic, and environmental costs of the bomb, and traces the efforts to ban the bomb, including the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.