Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, 1945-1953

The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy, 1945-1953

Samuel R. Williamson and Steven L. Rearden
Reviewed by By Eliot A. Cohen
September/October 1993
Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.
Samuel R. Williamson and Steven L. Rearden
St. Martin's Press
1993
224 pp.
$45.00

A book that is exactly what it seems-a good, short, reliable and straightforward account of how nuclear weapons became "America's first line of defense." Based on primary sources, this is an account of high-level decision-making and very much in the mold of traditional strategic history.

Related

Essay, Jul/Aug 2004
History and the Hyperpower
Eliot A. Cohen

Whether or not the United States today should be called an empire is a semantic game. The important point is that it resembles previous empires enough to make the search for lessons of history worthwhile. Overwhelming dominance has always invited hostility. U.S. leaders thus must learn the arts of imperial management and diplomacy, exercising power with a bland smile rather than boastful words.

Read
Essay, Nov/Dec 2000
Defending America in the Twenty-first Century
Eliot A. Cohen

Despite a vast budget that dwarfs the military spending power of both friends and foes, the U.S. military today remains stuck in the past. American strategy still relies on a Cold War-era view of the world, and U.S. technology is ill-suited to current missions. Meanwhile, demoralization is creeping through the ranks. The next president must seize the opportunity to remake the military by forcing it to focus on the missions of the future rather than those of the past. The alternative -- more of the same -- is too dangerous to consider.

Read
Essay, May/Jun 2002
A Tale of Two Secretaries
Eliot A. Cohen

Donald Rumsfeld has gotten better press as a secretary of war than he did as a secretary of defense. But the latter job is tougher, so he deserves some sympathy. The dilemmas of U.S. defense policy today reflect more than individual foibles and the difficulty of transforming a giant, often dysfunctional bureaucracy. Even more important, they stem from America's profoundly ambivalent and only semiconscious acceptance of its unique, world-historical role. Whatever the pace at which the Pentagon adapts to that fact, it must do so, and the more swiftly the better.

Read