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The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War
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55
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
56/100Critics
17/100Scholars
91/100Author:
Fred Kaplan
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster
Date:
January 28, 2020
From the author of The Wizards of Armageddon and Pulitzer Prize finalist comes a history of American policy on nuclear warâand Presidentsâ actions in nuclear crisesâfrom Truman to Trump.
What The Reviewers Say
...revealed with bracing clarity.
Pick up Fred Kaplan’s The Bomb with caution, and as a cautionary tale. The caution is required because of the fear this book will relieve. The cautionary tale is the effect this book should have.
In The Bomb, his excellent history of nuclear war and its long shadow, Fred Kaplan...uses more recently released classified documents to focus on the actual policymakers, describing with lucidity and a healthy dose of dark irony their trips down the rabbit hole.
[Kaplan] distinguishes himself with tight, journalistic accounts of what one might term the 'high nuclear politics' of D.C. policy makers, military men, public intellectuals and government officials, especially as they quarreled behind closed doors. Mr. Kaplan pulls together tales from candid interviews with participants, while also drawing on declassified (and often eye-popping) documents from presidential libraries, Department of Defense files and State Department records. His notes on sources—there is, alas, no bibliography—pay little attention to scholarly monographs on U.S. foreign and nuclear policy. Mr. Kaplan’s forte is with the primary stuff, not the secondary literature.
