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The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford Nuclear Age Series)
 
 
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The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford Nuclear Age Series) (Paperback)

~ Fred Kaplan (Author), Martin Sherwin (Author) "IT WAS AUGUST 7, 1945, a cool but sticky Tuesday morning in Bethany, Connecticut, a sleepy suburb resting on the northwestern edges of New Haven..." (more)
Key Phrases: counterforce campaign, steering panel, emergency war plan, United States, Soviet Union, Bernard Brodie (more...)
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
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o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
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The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford Nuclear Age Series) + On Thermonuclear War + The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War
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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."

Product Details

  • Paperback: 456 pages
  • Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (August 1, 1991)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0804718849
  • ISBN-13: 978-0804718844
  • Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #382,162 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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More About the Author

Fred M. Kaplan
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
IT WAS AUGUST 7, 1945, a cool but sticky Tuesday morning in Bethany, Connecticut, a sleepy suburb resting on the northwestern edges of New Haven. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
counterforce campaign, steering panel, emergency war plan, strategic retaliatory forces, limited nuclear options, counterforce targets, counterforce strike, strategic community, absolute weapon, nuclear war plan, strategic offensive forces, theater nuclear forces, counterforce strategy, tactical warning, social science division, bomber gap, targeting plan, atomic arsenal, general nuclear war, bargaining lever, hardened shelters, more nuclear weapons, missile gap, overseas bases, strategic air offensive
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
United States, Soviet Union, Bernard Brodie, Air Staff, Joint Chiefs, Gaither Committee, Paul Nitze, New York, Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, White House, Santa Monica, Charlie Hitch, Secretary of State, Tommy White, Western Europe, Whiz Kids, Bill Kaufmann, Gaither Report, William Kaufmann, Alain Enthoven, Harry Rowen, Strategic Air Command, Los Alamos, State Department
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Customer Reviews

7 Reviews
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4.3 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars The human side of the "nuclear strategists", November 21, 2003
By Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
Fred Kaplan has done something very hard to achieve: portray a bunch of, well, nerds with sympathy and humor, explaining their trains of logic and their conclusions in readable prose. It is hard because most of them were micro-economists who lived in a world of utility functions, game theory, and loops of mathematical logic - just the kind of stuff that puts many off (like me) of "public policy" as an academic field that is dominated by economists who are little more than self-important if intelligent twits - with no practical wisdom whatsoever.

However, this group was important because they were trying to encapsulate nuclear weapons into their rationalist methodologies. Kaplan's book is the ideal companion to Freeman's Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, which is so dry by comparison and yet covers the strategy better. It is a fun read, though a bit overwhelming to get through as there were SO MANY of them. (There was an added interest for me, as I knew some of these characters as a student and was unimpressed with them as thinkers while respecting their impact on public policy.)

Whoever thought that microeconomists following their threads of logic could have had such an enormous influence on military strategy. I never would have! If I understood it, what they did was link military considerations into a mathematical methodology that could be studied and discussed and that offered conclusions - or predictions - if (tortuously) followed to their end. This helped military planers get a handle on these issues and (perhaps) to think more clearly.

Much of quality of this book is due to the fact that Kaplan is a really good reporter and not an academic who is just shuffling papers. He got out and talked to a lot of these guys, though none of them appear as particularly sympathetic characters to me. Amazingly, he used this book as his PhD disseration at MIT in poli-sci. You gotta respect him as a writer.

Recommended as a colorful view of some weird thinkers who had enormous influence on our lives.

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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars The Bomb I Grew Up With, June 8, 2000
By Teresa Case (Outside the Walls in Leavenworth, KS) - See all my reviews
This fascinating review of nuclear strategy covers the period from 1945 to 1990. It is extraordinarily clear in presenting the options faced by Presidents and decision makers, and how they resulted in strategy that varied between "Nuke them back to the Stone Age" in 1948 to "MX Racetracks in the Nevada Desert" in the Caarter and Reagan Administration.

I found it a most compelling read, causing me to sacrifice sleep to continue, because it names names, dates, and places. Insight into all the news figures I grew up seeing on TV News.

I grew up as an Army Brat in the 1960's and 1970's, and this book explains why many of the weapons systems came and went. In-fact, it explains why our family "Came and Went" on a few stations!

I highly recommend this if you have even a passing interest in Nuclear War strategy and National Policy, or even in what part you and/or your parents/grandparents played in the "Big Picture".

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting read, July 6, 2005
By J. Bosiljevac (san fran, ca) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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 agenda, intelligence and strategy has been slave to policy, not the other way around.

But aside from the political maneuverings and dealings, this book covers the rise of the defense intellectua--strategists born of academic economic theory rather than hardened by battlefield experience--to the highest ranks in devising nuclear strategy. It covers the cycles, from an all-out destroy everything strategy to a counterforce/military targets strategy, from viewing the atomic bomb as the ultimate weapon to considering it merely another tool in the conventional arsenal. Through the years, the strategies came and went in phases, but in reality there were only a few recycled strategies, and basically the same problem holds for each: we just don't know if they'll work. They're all theory, despite the illusion, during the Reagan years, that these are tested, scientific truths. After more than fifty years, the only truth is that we still haven't figured out how to use the atomic weapon. The only thing that can be said for certain is that we have, to date, avoided nuclear holocaust. Considering how close came on more than one instance during the Cold War, that is a feat in itself. Whether the atom bomb can be credited for deterring Armageddon or whether we managed to avoid it despite the bomb is a question this book examines. But there are really no fast and true answers.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars 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... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Anthony Bezich

5.0 out of 5 stars 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. Read more
Published on April 25, 2005 by David W. Southworth

4.0 out of 5 stars 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... Read more
Published on November 13, 2004 by David Berry

5.0 out of 5 stars The Bomb I Grew Up Studying
This book was one of the greatest I have had the pleasure to read. I was so fascinated reading this that I stayed up reading the book for three days straight. Read more
Published on December 16, 2002

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