ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the crises of the nuclear era and the risks of the military use of nuclear capabilities. It examines the work of scientists in the context of the lead-up to the race to develop nuclear weaponry in the early 1940s. These include Enrico Fermi, a physicist had won the 1938 Nobel Prize and who was focusing on how to control fusion for the secret Manhattan Project, and Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer. The world after Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings was one in which the major global powers faced critical decisions about how they would choose to interact with one another. Central to the postwar world were relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, nations with a tremendous mistrust of one another. The chapter also outlines the Reagan Administration's plan of a missile defence shield named as Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), and the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Soviet Union.
