The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

(Paperback)

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From the author of the classic The Wizards of Armageddon and Pulitzer Prize finalist comes the definitive history of American policy on nuclear warand Presidents actions in nuclear crisesfrom Truman to Trump.

Fred Kaplan, hailed by The New York Times as a rare combination of defense intellectual and pugnacious reporter, takes us into the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs of Staffs Tank in the Pentagon, and the vast chambers of Strategic Command to bring us the untold storiesbased on exclusive interviews and previously classified documentsof how Americas presidents and generals have thought about, threatened, broached, and just barely avoided nuclear war from the dawn of the atomic age until today.

Kaplans historical research and deep reporting will stand as the permanent record of politics. Discussing theories that have dominated nightmare scenarios from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kaplan presents the unthinkable in terms of mass destruction and demonstrates how the nuclear war reality will not go away, regardless of the dire consequences.

Author Bio

Fred Kaplan is the national-security columnist forSlateand the author of five previous books, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War,The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestseller), 1959, Daydream Believers, and The Wizards of Armageddon. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Brooke Gladstone.