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Charts Winston Churchill´s evolving views on nuclear weapons, beginning with the war-time development of the atomic bomb and continuing into the Cold War.

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Covering the development of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, the origins and early course of the Cold War, and the advent of the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, Churchill and the Bomb explores a still neglected aspect of Winston Churchill´s career - his relationship with and thinking on nuclear weapons. Kevin Ruane shows how Churchill went from regarding the bomb as a weapon of war in the struggle with Nazi Germany to viewing it as a weapon of communist containment (and even punishment) in the early Cold War before, in the 1950s, advocating and arguably pioneering what would become known as "mutually assured destruction" as the key to preventing the Cold War flaring into a calamitous nuclear war.

While other studies of Churchill have touched on his evolving views on nuclear weapons, few historians have given this hugely important issue the kind of dedicated and sustained treatment it deserves. In Churchill and the Bomb, however, Kevin Ruane has undertaken extensive primary research in Britain, the United States and Europe, and accessed a wide array of secondary literature, in producing an immensely readable yet detailed, insightful and provocative account of Churchill´s nuclear hopes and fears.

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Acknowledgements
Abbreviations used in text
Introduction: So Many Winston Churchills
Part I: War
1. Only Connect
2. Tube Alloys
3. Allies at War
4. The Quebec Agreement
5. Mortal Crimes
6. Bolsheviks, Bombs and Bad Omens
7. Trinity and Potsdam
Part II: Cold War
8. Heavy Metal, Iron Curtain
9. Warmonger/Peacemonger
10. To the Summit
11. Atomic Angles
12. Hurricane Warning
13. A Pill to End it All
14. H-bomb Fever
15. The July Days16. Sturdy Child of Terror
Conclusion: ´. if God wearied of mankind´
Abbreviations used in notes
Bibliography
Index

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[An] astute chronicle of a long overlooked aspect of Churchill´s service to Great Britain . Ruane makes a compelling case for the atomic bomb as both a military and a diplomatic instrument, as seen from the perspective of a power vulnerable to Soviet devastation a decade earlier than the United States . Kevin Ruane has refined our understanding of a towering figure of the twentieth century. Michigan War Studies Review

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