A Wizardly History of Nuclear Weapons

After the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, the eminent American strategist Bernard Brodie presciently wrote, “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now its chief purpose must be to avert them.” Ever since then, this key proposition has formed the basis of nuclear deterrence. Despite Brodie’s fundamental insight, a range of American strategists and policy makers nevertheless planned on the use of nuclear weapons in the event that deterrence failed. To that end, they engaged in endless debates about the appropriate configuration of American nuclear forces to ensure both that deterrence would prevail and that, if it did not, the United States would prevail over its principal nuclear-armed adversary, the Soviet Union. Much of the history of the nuclear age has been covered in earlier works. McGeorge Bundy’s masterful account, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, not only dealt with the US–Soviet nuclear rivalry but also provided capsule accounts of various other states that went on to acquire nuclear weapons. Beyond this history of the nuclear age, the historian Gregg Herken, in Counsels of War, dwelt on the plethora of scientists, scholars, and analysts who shaped American nuclear strategy from the genesis of the nuclear age to the heights of the Cold War. Shortly before the publication of Herken’s book, Fred Kaplan had published a similar volume, The Wizards of Armageddon. Of necessity, Kaplan’s new work, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals and the Secret History of Nuclear War, covers some of the same ground. Many of the same characters who had populated his previous work turn up again in the present book. However, the principal focus of the newer volume is the evolution of American nuclear strategy. The book deals much more explicitly with the debates, arguments, and bureaucratic politics underlying the development of particular nuclear-weapons systems and the strategies for their deployment and possible use. Kaplan’s mastery of the particulars of the history, politics, and technologies is extraordinary. He provides detailed and granular accounts of key personalities, specific turning points, and important epochs. In this regard, the book is markedly different from Lawrence Freedman’s magisterial work The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, which is an academic examination of the progression of nuclear thinking. Kaplan’s book begins with a discussion of the US plans to acquire a nuclear force. As Kaplan describes it, the early stages involved hauling and pulling between various military organizations shortly after the use of the first atomic bombs at the end of World War II. It is fascinating to learn that, at the outset, neither the Navy nor the Army was especially