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The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford Nuclear Age Series)
by: Fred Kaplan, Martin Sherwin

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 355.0217
EAN: 9780804718844
ISBN: 0804718849
Label: Stanford University Press
Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 456
Publication Date: August 01, 1991
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Sales Rank: 425474
Studio: Stanford University Press

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
This is the untold story of the small group of men who have devised the plans and shaped the policies on how to use the Bomb. The book (first published in 1983) explores the secret world of these strategists and the nuclear age and brings to light a chapter in American political and military history never before revealed.

This is the third volume in the 'Stanford Nuclear Age Series.'

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Put that in your pipe and nuke it
Dr. Kaplan offers a readable, enjoyable, and informative look at the "pipe-smoking" defense intellectuals who created from scratch nuclear strategy and policy for the United States following World War II. Kaplan describes these men and their accomplishments and failures within the context of historical events and their relationships to institutions, political and military leaders, and one another. Trained as a nuclear target analyst in the military during the Cold War, I particularly enjoyed and appreciated this book.

Rating:

- An interesting read
This is the history of the strategy behind the U.S. nuclear arsenal, from the moment we dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima through the Reagan years. While the book does get into specifics about meetings and memos, the over-arching story is quite interesting, especially as it pertains to the current state of affairs with U.S. foreign policy. If there is one lesson to take away from the book, it is that strategy and intelligence can and will be built around a predetermined political goal, when an administration chooses to use it in such a way. Bush Jr. is not the first, nor will he be the last president to have intelligence manufactured to support his specific strategy. From early on, when the Air Force and Army officials crafted their intelligence reports to favor themselves when it came time to create the budgets, to Kissinger's altering of CIA reports on Soviet missiles to support his own missile defense ... Read More

Rating:

- Excellent Historical Analysis
Fred Kaplan, who today writes for Slate.com, twenty years ago, wrote this excellent intellectual history of a distinct group of policymakers who emerged after World War II. This group of intellectuals, centered on the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, used mathematical equations and statistical analyses to attempt to rationalize and control nuclear weapons and their possible use in combat.

Kaplan found that after forty years, from the later 1940s until the early 1980s, when the book was published, intellectual thought went from assurances that nuclear war could be controlled; to a belief in the 1960s that controlling such a weapon is impossible. When the Berlin and Cuba crises of the early 1960s erupted and these intellectuals were actually confronted with the possibility of nuclear war that the rationalizations ended.

However, in the early 1980s the idea began to emerge again ... Read More

Rating:

- The Human and the Rational Sides of Armageddon
This is Fred Kaplan's version of the evolution of U.S. nuclear strategy during the Cold War. More specifically, it is the story of the role played by the RAND Institute, a think-tank in Santa Monica, California. The RAND Institute pioneered civilian consulting on military matters, and by the time Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, nearly all of the Institute's principal recommendations had become official administration policy.

Based largely on archival research of declassified documents and personal interviews, Kaplan does a good job in capturing the personalities, egos, and relationships at work. He dispenses with in-depth discussion of data and interpretation, instead trying to create a humane narrative. He rarely engages in either personal attack or praise, instead focusing on how his protagonists arrived at certain conclusions. Still, the book is not without a didactic element. The RAND Institute imposed ... Read More

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