Book review – “The Bomb”

The Bomb’ Review: Down the Nuclear Rabbit Hole
Until 1989, no president had ever been privy to the military’s list of specific targets in the Soviet Union. WSJ, Paul Kennedy, Jan. 31, 2020, In the summer of 1945, as a mushroom cloud rose high above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the very history of war and diplomacy, and the world of Great Power relations, changed irrevocably. Science had created a weapon of such indiscriminate destructiveness that it ought, now that its ferocity was clear, never to be used again. This became even more obvious to contemporary observers when the more powerful hydrogen bombs appeared on the scene only a few years later, and when the Soviet Union also quickly acquired similar weaponry.

Before that time, the saying went, the leaders of the Great Powers had to figure out only how to win wars; now their awful duty was to ensure that they avoided war among themselves so that this most powerful weapon in their armory would never be used. This was not just another big bomb, as Truman had called it before he, too, realized things were different. This was an existential device, and, ironically, possessing tens of thousands of these devices did not necessarily make you safer. If America had 30,000 warheads and the U.S.S.R. also had 30,000 warheads, who felt more secure? ……..

American presidents and their civilian and military advisers have repeatedly found themselves in a box—a “rabbit hole” is the word frequently used in Fred Kaplan’s new book—scrambling to get out, and failing to do so. A good number of members of the U.S. military, joined by some hawkish intellectuals, have indeed thought that nuclear weapons were “usable” and some presidents did at times threaten obliteration, but for most concerned the main effort has been to ensure that they were never, ever used.

And what an effort that was, as Mr. Kaplan reveals in “The Bomb: Presidents, Generals and the Secret History of Nuclear War.” ……….

The stakes are enormous, it seems; no other form of conflict and warfare counts; really, no other form of history counts. Mesmerized by the dramatic detail, the reader might find it hard to disagree. ……….

Successive presidents were introduced to their awesome nuclear responsibilities, blinked hard and strove to alter them, but they made little progress in overcoming the system. The improving world situation, and the early post-Soviet years especially, allowed limited pullbacks: The B-52 bomber force was no longer kept on constant alert, for instance. But it is instructive to read how highly intelligent presidents, with no great early interest in nuclear or even overall military matters, found themselves sucked into decisions whose outcomes then became part of their legacies—such as the success or failure, during the Obama administration, of the 2010 New Start treaty with the Russians………

with something of a shock, one arrives at the present, at the Age of Trump, analyzed by Mr. Kaplan in a 38-page chapter titled “Fire and Fury”—these were the words repeatedly used by our current president in 2017 when threatening North Korea with oblivion if it continued to threaten us. Mr. Kaplan claims to bring the reader into the inner sanctums of a presidency whose leader, instead of being impressed at the story of our nuclear warheads having been reduced from 32,000 to a mere 2,500, complains that he really wants the U.S. to have many more such weapons……….

Absent some stunning transformation in the minds of men, the Great Powers will keep nuclear weapons in their armories as deterrents and strive to prevent their use—and, indeed, the very existence of nuclear weapons probably has deterred some statesmen now and then from rash and aggressive actions. The crazy logic of it all, Mr. Kaplan senses, will go on. Yet he ends up being a very frightened critic, not just because of the present commander-in-chief, but because he honestly wonders how many more wars we can dodge before a combination of “slow-wittedness and misfortune” tips things over.

“The Bomb” is a work that should make thoughtful readers even more thoughtful. But it is not a book for the faint of heart. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bomb-review-down-the-nuclear-rabbit-hole-11580487715