...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.

However disturbing Kaplan’s revelations about the Cold War might be, the horrors are blunted by the simple fact of belonging to the past. The most chilling chapter of this book concerns President Donald Trump. When he was briefed on the success of reducing the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal in recent decades, he demanded to know why he couldn’t have more nuclear weapons.

Kaplan, a US foreign affairs journalist, is a maverick sniping at the flanks of the US politico-military establishment.

This an authoritative and highly readable history of the Damocles Sword that has hung over humanity for some 70 years and shows no signs of being sheathed or turned into plowshares.

This balanced recounting of American nuclear strategizing, by the knowledgable author of The Wizards of Armageddon (1983), is chillingly matter-of-fact in its recounting of political leaders discussing millions of deaths, destruction of cities, and, frankly, the unthinkable.

... a taut, detailed history.

The book is rich in detail, perhaps too much so — accounts of conversations decades ago occasionally bog down a meticulous and frightening rendering of how the United States and Russia remain on alert to launch enough nuclear weapons to make global warming seem like a minor annoyance..

... a detailed, incisive picture of how U.S. presidents have thought about their most troubling responsibility.

... frequently terrifying.