We all lost the Cold War
The purpose of the book is to use the experience of two actual Cold War crises to test the hypothesis that it was the U.S. strategy of deterrence that was primarily responsible for preventing war with the Soviet Union and teaching them that aggression would not pay. The two crises; the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the Middle East crisis of 1973 have been widely interpreted as victories for U.S. deterence strategy. The authors draw on sources that were previously unavailable, both documents and interviews. The authors show that it was the fear of any nuclear use, not quantitative assessments of the nuclear balance, that deterred both Soviet and American leaders in the two crises examined. Each side believed that the loss of even a single city was unacceptable. This implies that the benefits of nuclear weapons derive from their ability to annihilate cities. A policy of finite deterence would rely almost exclusively on this threat to civilians, raising further moral questions.
- OSTI ID:
- 44943
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: DN: From review by Allan S. Krass, Hampshire College, in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 50, No. 5 (Sep-Oct 1994); PBD: 1994
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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