To Kill Nations

Reviews / Votes

In To Kill Nations Edward Kaplan describesa long process of evolution and adaptation as U.S. political and military leaders grappled with integrating nuclear weapons into national defense after World War II. Strikingly, he sees not a sudden revolution but a gradual process of incremental changes in military preparedness policy and action.

(Journal of American History) There are many other studies of weapons development and Eisenhower and Kennedy's approaches to national defense. The great strength of Kaplan's is his tracing of the evolution of US policy in response to perceived Soviet capabilities. He astutely demonstrates how the Berlin and Cuban missile crises exposed the drawbacks of preparing primarily for an atomic war with the Soviet Union.To Kill Nations will enlighten readers seeking an intelligent overview of the evolution of airpower strategy in the first twenty-five years of the Cold War as well as, more specifically, President Eisenhower's New Look security policy and Robert McNamara's influence on national security strategy during the Kennedy administration.

(Michigan War Studies Review) Kaplan draws extensively on archival records, including declassified government documents, to tell the story of how US nuclear strategy went from being focused on winning nuclear war with the Soviet Union to being more in line with the [mutually assured destruction] thinking made famous by early nuclear deterrence scholars, such as Thomas Schelling.... The book is a well-researched, interesting history of SAC and SAC's influence on US national security strategy during the first twenty years of the Cold War.

(H-NET Reviews) Edward Kaplan's To Kill Nations is a fascinating work that packs a thermonuclear punch of ideas and arguments into 223 pages of dense but readable text (260 including endnotes, etc.). The work is suitable for anyone from advanced undergraduates to experts in the field.

(Strategy Bridge)