6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant analysis of US nuclear and military strategy, July 7, 2006
Some books don't date even when times change. This well-researched, clearly written, extremely scary analysis of US nuclear and military strategy was published in the 1980s, when there was a Red Menace, but its main points remain as valid and alarming today as when it was written.
Putting US nuclear strategy and weapons systems decisions in historical context, Axelrod and Kaku (both physics professors, one at Michigan, the other at CCNY) show how US nuclear policy fits into a global warfighting policy aimed at establishing absolute unilateral US dominance in any military conflict. Unlike many military and strategic analyses, the book puts the issues into a larger political and economic context, explaining US military policy as part of a general plan to establish economic control over both poorer third world nations with valuable natural resources and potential wealthy European or Japanese competitors for economic mastery.
The book establishes beyond a reasonable doubt, based on careful historical research and declassified government documents, that the US was never satisfied with the nuclear standoff in which nuclear weapons were never to be used because that would lead to global annihilation. Rather, US nuclear policy was a "warfighting" strategy based on the hope that nuclear weapons could be integrated into an "escalation ladder" of credible threats backed by the potential of actual nuclear warfare involving only "acceptable" casualties.
The idea of the US strategic planners and the Pentagon, Kaku and Axelrod show, was that conventional and counterinsurgency warfare would be backed by the capacity to use small "tactical" nuclear weapons either if US forces were endangered or to make a terrifying demonstration of US might. The then-Soviet Union would be kept out of such conflicts by the credible treat of a first strike on its missile silos with highly accurate ICBM warheads ("silo-busters") and effective anti-nuclear submarine warfare; some of the residual Soviet nuclear weapons could hopefully be neutralized by ballistic massile defense ("star wars"). Axelrod and Kaku show by case studies how the United States actually threatedned to use nuclear weapons in more than a score of cases that bear out this theory.
The alarming thing today is how little has changed. Although the USSR is no more, US policy still plainly seeks to dominate the third world and its economic resources by military might, and to maintain superiority over its allies and potential competitors by essentially the same means, as is shown by the Gulf War of 1990-91 and the current war in Iraq.
Work on tactical nuclear weapons, bunker-busters (talked of as possible weapons to be used against Iran in 2003-2006) more accurate ICBMs, and Star Wars -- now supposedly directed at the hypothetical threat from North Korea(!) -- continues at a very expensive pace. Axelrod and Kaku's book remaind essential reading for understanding both the Cold War and current American foreign and military policy.
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5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book everyone should own!, June 26, 2006
In a world where information was freely exchanged where the media existed to inform the public on the most important things, this book would be promoted as an essential for any person who claims to be informed. Instead, it is a secret, passed around by the knowledgeable, those not going along with the program, fighters for humanity.
From World War Two until the days of the Reagan Star Wars project when this book was written, THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT'S CENTRAL PLAN WAS TO BE ABLE TO LAUNCH A NUCLEAR WAR AGAINST THE SOVIET UNION AND PERHAPS CHINA.
This is proved in this book by documentation from United States government documents released through the Freedom of Information Act. In 1947, when the Berlin Crisis broke out, Truman sent the atomic bombers to England to launch war with the Soviet Union, but could not wage war because their were not enough atomic bombs (a chronic problem because until the early 1950s, atomic bombs made by the US only lasted a month). In the 1950s, when Truman recalled McArthur to Wake Island, it was to tell him that there were not enough atomic bombs for wars with both China and the USSR. McArthur could not launch war with China, because the USSR was the priority.
It is more widely known that the US offered to rescue the French colonialists from their defeat at Dien Bien Phu with a nuclear attack, but less known that in both the 1967 and 1973 wars, it was Washington's nuclear threats that guaranteed Israeli victories.
Those who claim the antiwar movement had no effect will be corrected by this book's coverage of Vietnam. Those of us who heard Nixon claim he had a secret plan to end the war, poh poh it at the time. But he did. He was planning to launch a nuclear attack on the borders of North Vietnam and China and North Vietnam at the end of 1969. He threatened this to the Vietnamese who refused to retreat in their continued struggle for national liberation. In the fall of 1969, Nixon met with his generals and J Edgar Hoover. They told him that the antiwar activity was so strong that his nuclear campaign could not be launched. If it was done, they told him, they would need to bring troops home from Vietnam to fight the opponents of the war here.
With the United States bruiting about the world challenging countries it has savaged like Korea and Iran for daring to defend themselves with nuclear weapons, it can never be forgotten that Washington has tried to hold the world through nuclear blackmail since World War II, and that only mechanical failures and political pressures against the advice of Washington has prevented nuclear war. It can never be forgotten that Washington still has enough nuclear weapons to incinerate the planet.
One of the most despicable persons on the planet, David Greenglass who aided the government frameup of his own sister and beloved brother-in-law Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, as atomic bomb spies, who claimed he aided Soviet espionage was once asked what he was most ashamed of. Despite his cold war credentials, Greenglass answered, "working on the Manhattan project (the US-British wartime effort to build the first a-bomb.)" Asked why, Greenglass replied, "the Russians didnt drop a bomb on anyone. Only the USA dropped an atomic bomb on people."
Even Greenglass knows
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1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great read, January 12, 2006
This review is from: To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon's Secret War Plans (Paperback)
I am not reading this book right now, but my significant other is and he can't get enough of it! I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how the U.S. got itself in and out of the situations it has over the last several decades.
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