This book began during a long conversation about prisons and nuclear weapons with David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker. I somehow managed to write something that combined both of my long-standing interests. Remnick was extraordinarily patient and supportive from the first day until the last, despite how many months stretched in between. His magazine is one of the last great supporters of long-form investigative journalism. And the New Yorker has published some of the greatest writing on the nuclear threat. It was a real privilege to find my work in the same magazine that commissioned John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’, John McPhee’s ‘The Curve of Binding Energy’, and Jonathan Schell’s ‘The Fate of the Earth’. Those three classics are still powerful, disturbing and, unfortunately, relevant today.

At the New Yorker, John Bennet did a wonderful job of encouraging and editing me. Carolyn Kormann did most of the fact-checking, with assistance from Clare Malone and Neima Jahromi. Some of these details were not easy to confirm. I am deeply grateful for, and humbled by, every error they found. And Betsy Morais helped me with all the logistics.

At Penguin, Stefan McGrath has proven once again to be a bold editor and a dear friend.

Tina Bennett, my literary agent, is simply the best.

And without Red, my antidote to the darkness, this book would never have been written.

THE BEGINNING

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