John Mueller's book begins with a comment on, and remedy for, a lack of sleep, an affliction caused by fantasies of world destruction, dreams like lead that weigh on “policymakers and ordinary citizens” alike (ix). To shake these off, to sleep like the dead, he proposes an investigation that is arranged into three parts, into a trinity of arguments designed to demystify the existence and consequence of atomic weapons, to interrogate their historical impact, proliferation and possible terrorist appropriations. As such, the first part imagines a nuclear blast, a record of probable damage that has “very often been rendered in hyperbolic, indeed apocalyptic terms” (3), and which, rather than spectacular, becomes contained in an account that seeks to prove the atom bomb's marginality, its insignificance and “essential irrelevance” (50) to historical events. Mueller's thesis, in this opening segment, bears the spectre of Herman Kahn, whom he mentions, but does not link to the contention that the RAND analyst is so frequently associated with – the survivability of localized, manageable nuclear war or detonations – a line of reasoning that Mueller takes up and compresses into small paragraphs, a format he also retains for the rest of the book, as if to emphasize the weapon's suitability for containment, and whose effects, as a result, seem “tidy” (98) and restricted, totally controllable.

It is this strain and structure of thought which make the book unsettling, despite its convincing middle section, on the “Spread of Nuclear Weapons,” which forms, in many ways, the nucleus of this piece. Here, Mueller discusses test-ban treaties, the gaps they leave and out of which yet more formidable devices, with multiple warheads and increased accuracy, emerge, and whose regulations, paper limits, are so easily breached, or revoked. He rightly points towards the casualties and serious drawbacks of the “zero-tolerance proliferation policy,” the human and economic costs that result because of “atomic obsession” (130), which dictates sanctions cutting off food and medical supplies, and prevents engineering works to repair breakdowns in sanitation systems, so that it is, yet again, the “ordinary citizens” of poor, “pathetic” (152) and “paranoid” (136) regimes that are deprived of their lives, form the sacrifices of policies that conduct a million imperceptible little wars that result “in more human destruction than was inflicted [in] Hiroshima and Nagasaki” (141). While numbers of victims vary, depending on delimitations of studies, Mueller's claim remains valid, a necessary investigation of courses of action that also “enforce a tolerant attitude” (137) towards nations that, simply because they agree to reduce stockpiles, become exempt from scrutiny. Against the “bombast” (232) of fears that result in the implementation of quietly harmful strategies, these fatalities disappear, and it is important to raise them, these figures that haunt the margins of (ostensibly) anti-proliferation endeavours. Yet while this investigation asks some pertinent questions concerning the “surrounding” and apparently amplified “threat matrix” (144) of nuclear weapons, especially relating to ensuing regulation attempts, it fails, among other things, to consider why this device, despite being relegated to the periphery and condensed into small sections of text, casts such a spell over the world, over the United States, whose own paranoia and creation myth as superpower is nowhere addressed.