Customer Reviews

Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

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If you're a hard-core, die-hard aficionado of nuclear weapons issues (in other words you get high reading about obscure, esoteric minutiae), this is the book for you. The author has shown admirable resolve in tracking down the details about the whys and wherefores of the nuclear weapons community's disdain for the damage caused by nuclear-induced fires. However she does get redundant more than she needs to be, and she early on makes the salient points that the rest of the book ponderously reiterates. She touches on the nuclear winter controversy, but in an almost cursory fashion; odd, considering the central role fires played in that raging debate. (I am proud that I avoided saying "that firestorm of controversy.")

Still I recommend adding it to the nuke fan's library as she does add a needed dimension to the entire philosophy of nuclear war fighting, a concept too absurd to exist in any but our own techno-crazed society.

Lynn Eden's book is terrific. It is well written, well argued, theoretically innovative, empirically rich, methodologically sound, politically important, and controversial.

Eden argues that the nuclear weapons community has misinformed policy-makers and the public about the consequences of nuclear explosions by neglecting to calculate mass fires' ferocious effects on nuclear targets. The weapons community continues to neglect mass fire because they believe it is neither predictable nor as important as blast effects. Eden argues against this conventional view. Her argument is not technical - for that she relies on two well known and well respected nuclear physicists - but historical and sociological. After translating the technical reasons why mass fire should be incorporated into models of nuclear weapons effects - the explosion creates its own environment which overwhelms local environmental factors - she addresses the alternative explanations and advances her own explanation for the neglect of mass fire. The puzzle of how so many people could be so wrong about something so important makes this an intrinsically interesting story.

The political implications of Eden's argument are profound. Not only are nuclear weapons even more destructive than we had thought, but her argument has a direct bearing on current issues in nuclear strategy. Increasingly, some deterrence theorists imagine limited strikes with low-yield weapons in a variety of scenarios - such as to deter the use of chemical and biological weapons. We should know what these weapons do before we contemplate using them.