For nearly sixty years the menace of nuclear war has hung over humanity, while at the same time the promise of nuclear energy has enticed us. In Megawatts and Megatons, two of the world's most eminent physicists, Georges Charpak and Richard L. Garwin, assess with consummate authority the benefits of nuclear energy and the dangers of nuclear weaponry.

The United States has had a more successful foreign policy than any other great power in history. Council Senior Fellow Walter Russell Mead argues that the United States is successful because its strategy is rooted in Americans' concrete interests, which value trade and commerce as much as military security.

Read an excerpt of The Ideas That Conquered the World. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, three ideas dominate the world: peace as the preferred basis for relations between countries, democr…