The bomb bibliography
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers THE BOMB BIBLIOGRAPHY BOOKS THAT HELPED MY THINKING THE LITERATURE on nuclear weapons is vast, but much of it is written in a cautious, professional tone with one...
...Smith laments the failure to ban MIRVs, multiple warheads which are now threatening to upset the strategic balance...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...A collection of papers, mostly by scientists, on the medical, social, and ecological effects of nuclear war...
...Reading it, one marvels at Truman's effrontery in describing Hiroshima as "a military target...
...We're not likely to see 1939 again...
...Fuller, Armament and History (London: Eyrie & Spottswoode, 1946...
...In retrospect it's clear we were ahead all the way, but repeatedly feared the Russians were about to streak ahead...
...Kistiakowsky was Eisenhower's science advisor during the last years of his administration...
...Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon (Knopf, 1981...
...Ruth Adams and Susan Cullen, The Final Epidemic (Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, 1982...
...Most of these show that any use of nuclear weapons leads to heavy use...
...John Hersey, Hiroshima (Alfred Knopf, 1946...
...A brilliant short account of six people who survived the first nuclear weapon used in war, and of some of their friends, neighbors, and colleagues who did not...
...After the first Russian bomb was detonated in 1949, Ulam writes, "the general question was 'What now?' At once I said that work should be pushed on the 'super' ' - the H-bomb...
...Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (Viking, 1973...
...What we knew about Russian military programs, and when we knew it...
...Now Russian MIRVs threaten every American strategic weapon in a known location...
...Daniel O.Graham, Shall America be Defended...
...the whole idea of maintaining peace through the power to destroy is unadulterated madness...
...Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (Macmillan, 1960...
...Warfare will then take on a Krakatoan aspect...
...The MX is a prime example of a nuclear war-fighting weapon that can lead us closer to the catastrophe of an atomic holocaust...
...He kept a fascinating diary recording his running battle with the Pentagon, which always wanted more of everything...
...The result is a body of writing meticulous in scholarship and rigorous in analysis, but blinkered by the twin assumptions that things had to work out this way, and are well in hand...
...The trouble is that it takes ten years to build a weapons system, but we can't know what the Russians will be doing that far down the road...
...Smith headed the delegation which negotiated the SALT I agreement with Russia, a three-year ordeal recounted here in fascinating detail...
...Samuel Glasstone, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (U.S...
...the second strikes me as being willfully, even perversely, hopeful...
...Arlington House, 1979...
...Clausewitz wrote, "To introduce into the philosophy of war a principle of moderation would be an absurdity - war is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds...
...A principal cause of World War I was tight mobilization schedules which inexorably brought armies to frontiers where the best defense was an offense...
...1914 is what ought to worry us now...
...Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Oxford University Press, 1963...
...Solly Zuckerman, From Apes to Warlords (Harper & Row, 1978...
...The best of the many memoirs of the Manhattan Project, which built the first bomb...
...It is amusing in parts...
...It is long and difficult to read...
...Kahn is the Homer of the scenario, and his approach is still the basis for Pentagon war games...
...A detailed technical treatise, with a handy "Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer" - a sliderule-like device - in a pocket at the back...
...Of several minds: Thomas Powers THE BOMB BIBLIOGRAPHY BOOKS THAT HELPED MY THINKING THE LITERATURE on nuclear weapons is vast, but much of it is written in a cautious, professional tone with one eye on job opportunities in the Pentagon...
...By the end of 1950 the United States was firmly committed to nuclear weapons as the backbone of our military forces...
...This disgraceful Cold War is surely a war in which we as intellectuals ought at once to become conscientious objectors .'' But with few exceptions, the intellectuals all went to work for the Department of Defense...
...He argues that the MX would invite attack in a crisis, because it is accurate enough to threaten Soviet missiles...
...We were ahead in MIRVs - for the moment - and didn't want to lose an "advantage...
...Department of Defense, Third Edition 1977...
...The emphasis is on what bombs do to things, not people...
...How to use fear of Armageddon as a politico-military tool...
...I believed that weapons design also had a dynamic of its own...
...Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton University Press, 1960...
...Stanislaw Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician (Scribners, 1976...
...I declined...
...Following are some of the books that helped me form my own views...
...For to win a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the acme of skill.To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skills...
...John Prados, The Soviet Estimate (Dial, 1982...
...George Kistiakowsky, A Scientist at the White House (Harvard University Press, 1976...
...Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy . . . those skilled in war subdue the enemy's army without battle...
...What [D.M.] Butt was particularly anxious to know was the ratio of casualties per ton of bombs in areas with different housing densities...
...The result is planning based on worst-case analysis...
...Recently I was asked to lecture on the moral use of nuclear weapons...
...Europe had been preparing for war for thirty years, and eventually they had it...
...I knew of none...
...The title refers to the arc of a missile in flight...
...Scoville provides a fine introduction to the current debate over strategic policy...
...I'm not sure whether the first is true or not...
...Ulam captures the wartime cast of mind which allowed scientists to concentrate on the fascinating problems at hand...
...Herken documents why this happened, and how the Joint Chiefs of Staff planned to use the bomb in the event of war...
...Sherwin persuasively argues that Hiroshima was at least partly the result of Truman's hope the bomb would make Stalin easier to handle...
...The Chinese military thinker Sun Tzu, who wrote in the fourth century B.C., took the opposite view...
...Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed (Knopf, 1975...
...Strategic bombing enthusiasts were on the run, until Hiroshima...
...It might be described as the history of the next war, written in advance...
...As World War II drew to an end, Churchill asked, "What are we going to have between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover...
...Smith is both pithy and humane...
...It's hard to say...
...J.F.C...
...Lawrence Freedman, US Intelligence and the Soviet Threat (Westview, 1977...
...down the garden path...
...A professional soldier and military historian, Fuller concluded in 1946 that nuclear weapons changed everything...
...This book will explain why a house in the country with a stock of canned goods in the basement is not enough...
...They capture his cities without assaulting them and overthrow his state without protracted operations...
...It treats the missile as the dominant fact of human history...
...A former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency argues that Russia, detente and SALT have led the U.S...
...The emphasis is on what bombs do to people, communities, and the natural world-not things...
...Inevitably, he said, the bomb will be married to the rocket...
...Herbert Scoville, MX: Prescription for Disaster (MIT Press, 1981...
...This is a serious attempt to examine what modern war does to modern man...
...Still the best introduction to the if-we-do-this, then-they'll-do-that school of strategic analysis...
...C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III (Simon & Schuster, 1958...
...I had once heard President Eisenhower say that wars have a dynamic of their own...
...What was the war about...
...Zuckerman was at the heart of the WWII controversy over strategic bombing policy, a fierce and rational opponent of attacking cities...
...The chance of war increases when aggressive powers like the Soviet Union build more and better weapons than peaceful countries such as the U.S.Gerard Smith, Doubletalk: The Story of SALT I (Doubleday, 1980...
Vol. 109 • June 1982 • No. 11
