COUNTDOWN

A riveting investigation into the modern nuclear weapons landscape and its future.

Journalist Sarah Scoles has had unparalleled access to nuclear labs and sites, and has developed contacts on various levels and with a broad range of organizations and institutions to provide the clearest, most up-to-date look at nuclear weaponry today. The result is the first modern analysis of nuclear weapons, outlining both the geopolitical and cultural consequences as we move forward into the future.

The average person thinks about nuclear weapons less than they did during the mid-20th century. Yet, we live in a time when nuclear culture is more important than it has been since the Cold War as experts say we're closer to a nuclear catastrophe now than we were at the height of that conflict. Conversations surrounding weapons of mass destruction are generally discussed in past tense (as in Chernobyl) or sometimes as a future problem that's not yet upon us and may never be (as with the speculation about North Korea's nuclear capabilities). In Countdown, science journalist Sarah Scoles uncovers the shocking reality of our current nuclear age.

Drawing from years of on the ground reporting, from atomic bases to witnessing test explosions firsthand, Scoles challenges the comforting idea that having nuclear weapons keeps us safe, through the threat of "mutually-assured destruction." Rather, she deftly lays out the current nuclear apparatus, taking readers beyond the news headlines and policy speak to reveal how far nuclear technology has come, who the true decision-makers and gatekeepers are, and how the current generation of nuclear physicists have come to think about WMEs and a society that has the power to use them.

Through a sharp, surprising and undoubtedly urgent narrative, Scoles brings us out of the Cold War and into the present, opening readers eyes to the true nature of nuclear weapons while also giving us the needed context to understand the magnitude of our abilities, for now and for the future.

Sarah Scoles is a science journalist, a contributing writer at Wired, and contributing editor at Popular Science. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, VICE, NOVA, Discover, and Slate, among others. She is the author of two books: They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers (Pegasus Books, 2020) and Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Pegasus Books, 2018). She is the 2019 and 2020 winner of a Popular Media Award from the American Astronomical Society and the 2018 winner of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University.