Edward Kaplan (Author)
The End of Victory recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). In nuclear war, from 1953 onwards, American leaders chose to know as precisely as possible what would happen--how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain--if they failed. The NESC told Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy what the result of the worst failure of American strategy--a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States--would be. Edward Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR, and the size and shape of the American military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports were the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives.Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks of American strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks--and ones involving military force run grave ones--but that they can rarely be known with any precision.
...More
Book
Toshihiro Higuchi;
(2020)
Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis
(/isis/citation/CBB347886249/)
Book
Edward Kaplan;
(2020)
To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction
(/isis/citation/CBB328020999/)
Book
Edward Kaplan;
(2015)
To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction
(/isis/citation/CBB468361992/)
Book
Hornblum, Allen M.;
(2010)
The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb
(/isis/citation/CBB001231467/)
Article
Thompson, Nicholas;
(2011)
Nuclear War and Nuclear Fear in the 1970s and 1980s
(/isis/citation/CBB001231373/)
Book
Hoffman, David E.;
(2009)
The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy
(/isis/citation/CBB001231458/)
Essay Review
Schweber, S. S.;
Wellerstein, Alex;
Pollock, Ethan;
Bernstein, Barton J.;
Gordin, Michael D.;
(2011)
Contingencies of the Early Nuclear Arms Race
(/isis/citation/CBB001566754/)
Book
Toshihiro Higuchi;
(2020)
Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis
(/isis/citation/CBB212919708/)
Book
Susan Colbourn;
(2022)
Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO
(/isis/citation/CBB508430688/)
Book
Weiner, Sharon K.;
(2011)
Our Own Worst Enemy? Institutional Interests and the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Expertise
(/isis/citation/CBB001221236/)
Article
Elena Aronova;
(2017)
Geophysical Datascapes of the Cold War: Politics and Practices of the World Data Centers in the 1950s and 1960s
(/isis/citation/CBB204283086/)
Book
Gordin, Michael D.;
(2009)
Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly
(/isis/citation/CBB001022665/)
Book
Henry Richard Maar III;
(2022)
Freeze!: The Grassroots Movement to Halt the Arms Race and End the Cold War
(/isis/citation/CBB798931618/)
Article
Kaiser, David;
(2005)
The Atomic Secret in Red Hands? American Suspicions of Theoretical Physicists during the Early Cold War
(/isis/citation/CBB001021588/)
Book
Nicholas Michael Sambaluk;
(2015)
The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security
(/isis/citation/CBB873284440/)
Article
Doel, Ronald E.;
Friedman, Robert Marc;
Lajus, Julia;
Sörline, Sverker;
Wråkberg, Urban;
(2014)
Strategic Arctic Science: National Interests in Building Natural Knowledge---Interwar Era through the Cold War
(/isis/citation/CBB001450344/)
Review
David, James;
(July 2017)
Review of "Eyeing the Red Storm: Eisenhower and the First Attempt to Build a Spy"
(/isis/citation/CBB677842509/)
Article
Melanie Brand;
(2021)
Intelligence, warning, and policy: The Johnson administration and the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
(/isis/citation/CBB778819202/)
Book
Michael W. Hankins;
(2021)
Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia
(/isis/citation/CBB534059302/)
Thesis
Baesler, John Philipp;
(2009)
Clearer Than Truth: The Polygraph in Cold War America
(/isis/citation/CBB001561078/)
Be the first to comment!