Future prospects

In Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Retrospect and Prospect (Frank Cass & Co, £19.50 hbk, £9.95 pbk, ISBN 0 7146 4667 9), editors Douglas Holdstock and Frank Barnaby provide rather more of the former than the latter. The book is regrettably broken into past, present, future and “the goal” (a nuclear weapon-free world, to give away the surprise ending). “Japan as a Plutonium Superpower” and “Illegal Trafficking in Nuclear Fissile Materials” -both in the present – were most gripping bits.