The first book in Richard Rhodes’s nuclear trilogy, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, was an early favorite at Politics and Prose, and it was also awarded a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in nonfiction. When the Cold War ended, nine nations together possessed a staggering 60,000 nuclear weapons.  And today? THE TWILIGHT OF THE BOMBS (Knopf, $27.95), the final book in the series, states that since the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the arsenals of the superpowers have diminished. Although the current threat of nuclear war lies with the smaller and less stable nations like India and Pakistan, Rhodes believes that the possibility of a world without nuclear weapons is now within our reach. But how that is going to be accomplished is what Rhodes wants to explore, and he does so by reviewing the  past 65 years of successes and failures, both political and diplomatic, in nuclear-arms negotiations.