Serhii Plokhy—The New Nuclear Arms Race. Live In Conversation with Luke Harding
Date and time:
Monday 20 October, 2025
19:30 - 20:45
Location:
The Kiln Theatre
269 Kilburn High Road
London
NW6 7JR
Harvard’s Serhii Plokhy confronts the critical question of our age: what can we learn from the first nuclear arms race to stop the new one?
On 16 July 1945, the Nuclear Age began with the explosion of the first atomic bomb and the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer: ‘Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.’
While the threat of mutually assured destruction kept a lid on a simmering geopolitical landscape, events like the Chornobyl disaster and near-misses like the Cuban Missile Crisis showed that total destruction was only ever one malfunction or miscommunication away. Now, as governments re-arm their nuclear arsenals, treaties designed to limit the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons fall away, and nuclear weapons come increasingly within reach of non-state actors, we are on the brink of a renaissance of the nuclear industry.
Harvard Professor and world-leading authority on the history of nuclear science Serhii Plokhy returns to How To Academy with the Guardian’s Luke Harding to paint an intricate picture of a world governed by fear. We may soon see as many as forty additional nuclear-armed countries in the world, about five times as many as there are today. Yet the world has not fully recognized this new threat. Can we enhance the instinct of self-preservation shared by friends and foes alike to save the world once again?
Speaker
Serhii Plokhy
Serhii Plokhy is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize. His many acclaimed books, including Nuclear Folly, Atoms and Ashes and The Last Empire, have been translated into over a dozen languages. He is Professor of History at Harvard University where he also serves as Director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
Moderator
Luke Harding
Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with The Guardian. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin, and Moscow, and has also covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Between 2007 and 2011 he was The Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief. The Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the cold war, and in summer 2022 put him on an official blacklist. He is the author of Mafia State and co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (nominated for the Orwell Prize), and The Snowden Files. Two of Harding’s books have been made into films; The Fifth Estate and Snowden.
