nuclear-news

edited by Michael D. Gordin and G. John Ikenberry

Princeton University Press, 431 pp., $99.95; $32.95 (paper)……….The mushroom cloud became a universal symbol of horror. As Michael D. Gordin and G. John Ikenberry, the editors of The Age of Hiroshima, describe, entirely new ways of thinking about war and peace had to be invented, together with a new understanding of global interconnectedness. “Very few aspects of life,” geopolitical, technological, or cultural, they write, “have been left untouched,” not just among the superpowers but worldwide.  ……

by Fred Kaplan

Simon and Schuster, 372 pp., $30.00 ………..Kaplan tells the story of how, two weeks into the Kennedy administration, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara traveled to Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarters in Omaha for his first briefing on nuclear war’s holy text, the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). One of its thousands of targets, he learned, was an air defense radar station in Albania. The bomb slated to destroy it was—by then only a few years into the arms race—roughly three hundred times larger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. “Mr. Secretary,” said the commanding general, “I hope you don’t have any friends or relations in Albania, because we’re going to have to wipe it out.” Albania, a tiny country, was Communist but politically independent of Moscow.  …….

by William J. Perry and Tom Z. Collina

BenBella, 268 pp., $27.95 ………..What can be said with certainty, however, is that the threshold the US judges necessary to deter the enemy is always set immensely higher than what has actually deterred the US. In The Button, former defense secretary William J. Perry writes that at the time of the Cuban missile crisis the US had about five thousand warheads to the Soviets’ three hundred, but “even with this seventeen-to-one numerical superiority, the Kennedy administration did not believe it had the capability to launch a successful first strike.”

by Jeffrey Lewis

Mariner, 294 pp., $15.99 (paper)………  The more powerful reasons to doubt that there could be a limited nuclear war, to my mind, are those that emerge from any study of history, a knowledge of how humans act under pressure, or experience in government. In his “speculative novel” The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States (2018), the nuclear analyst Jeffrey Lewis convincingly traces the path to an unintended war. The book’s lessons are much broader than the particulars of the Korean setting. Lewis uses variations on actual events to trace a series of miscalculations, mistakes, coincidences, domestic pressures, and misreadings of others’ intentions………..   https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/08/20/new-nuclear-threat/