Overview: Avoiding Apocalypse: How Science and Scientists Ended the Cold War tells the little-known story of the worldwide scientists’ boycott of the Soviet Union that set in motion an astonishing sequence of events.

Starting simultaneously with the rise to power of an obscure Soviet bureaucrat named Mikhail Gorbachev, the scientists’ boycott led to the end not only of the Cold War but also of the Soviet Union itself.

Verdict: From an author who is uniquely suited to tell this story, and one who has spent his professional career as a research physicist, first at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and then at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (the two U. S. nuclear weapons design laboratories), helping to develop the science that has made technically possible a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), one linchpin of the Cold War stand-down, Avoiding Apocalypse: How Science and Scientists Ended the Cold War by Jeff Colvin is one of the most informative, intriguing and wholly-heartfelt books on the subject matter to hand that I personally have ever read.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the worry in the West was what would happen to that country’s thousands of nuclear weapons. Would “loose” nukes fall into the hands of terrorists, rogue states, criminals – and plunge the world into a nuclear nightmare?

Fortunately, scientists and technical experts (in both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, in all truth) rolled up their sleeves to manage and contain the nuclear problem in the dissolving Communist country.

But the nuclear experts faced an immense problem. The Soviets had about 39,000 nuclear weapons in their country and in Eastern Europe and about 1.5 million kilograms of plutonium and highly enriched uranium (the fuel for nuclear bombs).

Consider that the bomb that the U.S. dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945 was only six kilograms of plutonium, he added. Meanwhile, the U.S. had about 25,000 nuclear weapons in the early 1990s.

The challenge that Russia faced with its economy collapsing was enormous, but the Russian scientists were motivated to act responsibly, because they realized the awful destruction that a single nuclear bomb could wreak.

In short, the primary reason why we didn’t have a nuclear catastrophe was the Russian nuclear workers, the Russian nuclear officials, and most importantly, the Russian scientists. [For the record, the Soviet collapse was due to the decline of communist ideology and economic failure which would have happened even without Gorbachev].

Their dedication, their professionalism, their patriotism for their country was so strong that it carried them through these times in the 1990s; especially when they often didn’t get paid for six months at a time!

A compulsive read of a time in history when a lot of us either turned our backs on the situation, not wanting to know, or buried ourselves so heavily into the TV coverage that our anger sometimes got the better of us, Avoiding Apocalypse: How Science and Scientists Ended the Cold War is an historical read that reveals how the decade long stand-off between superpowers came to a calming conclusion, what went into it, just who were the overall soothsayer’s of the peace, and sadly, maybe how things have not changed all that much since those days of human-intervened diffusion.

About The Author - Jeff Colvin has spent the past 45 years as a research physicist helping to develop the science that has made technically possible a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), one linchpin of the Cold War stand-down.

He is the author or co-author of nearly 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications and has written (with Jon Larsen) what has now become the standard graduate-level text book in the new field of physics: Extreme Physics. He lives part-time in Livermore, California, and part-time in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

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