85 Seconds to Midnight

A grave warning from one of the world's great scientists

“What drives these pages is the guilty conscience of my professions, theoretical physics. My sole aim is to help avert what seems to me to be the unintended, yet scarcely avoidable, endpoint of the current actions of the governments we have elected: nuclear war.”

The world is rearming and embroiled in endless conflict. The Doomsday Clock has now been set to 85 seconds to midnight, with the risk of nuclear war the highest it has ever been. Why have we failed to learn from the past?

In this urgent book, acclaimed physicist Carlo Rovelli reframes the history of nuclear weapons as a history of fear, errors, and misunderstandings. Beginning with the birth of the atomic age, he revisits the crucial decisions that defined it—why Nazi Germany didn’t build the bomb and why the United States chose to use it—before examining the narrowly averted disasters of the Cold War and the dangerous brinksmanship pushing us closer to disaster today.

As he grapples with the legacy of his scientific forebears, Rovelli spotlights the reckless saber-rattling of our politicians and how vulnerable we are still to nuclear Armageddon. A timely and passionate warning, this searing reckoning with short-sighted politics is essential reading for anyone seeking sanity at our moment of greatest peril.