William L Shirer was set against nuclear weaponry, as indicated by the following
passage from Rise and Fall:
"Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the
tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the
empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia.
The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden
intervention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile, and of rockets that
can be aimed to hit the moon.
"In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the
old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by
suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last
long, and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no
conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet."
Rise and Fall spends a lot of space on dealing with the personalities behind the terrible events of that period, in particular Adolf Hitler. Shirer points out at the outset that although the events were almost inevitable following Germany's defeat due to the inherent weaknesses in the Weimar Constitution, none of them would have happened quite the way they did had not Hitler been there to drive them on. His rabid anti-semitism was a common feature in inter-War Germany, yet without his political savvy, leadership, determination and - in no small measure - megalomania and psychosis it is debatable whether the Holocaust would ever have occurred. Shirer considers these points in greater detail in Rise and Fall than I have found in any other comprehensive history of the Third Reich.
Rise and Fall is without doubt the best history of that period I have ever read, and I commend it to anyone interested in finding out how such a repulsive regime came to power, worked, and then collapsed.