The Bomb

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

Author: Fred Kaplan

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2020 (First)

ISBN: 9781982107291

Pages: 372

Opening of the nuclear age with the ruthless bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought in a new dimension in warfare. The unacceptable level of devastation in infrastructure and human lives at first presented a scenario to presidents and generals that immensely favoured those who possessed the weapons. However, the nuclear gap between the US and its arch enemy, the Soviet Union, closed in just one decade thanks in most part to espionage by politically motivated scientists and technicians who worked in the American nuclear effort. With Russia acquiring the nuclear capability, stalemate returned in international policy. Both sides tried hard to be one step ahead of their rival by devising grand plans for a nuclear first strike which would cripple the enemy’s atomic stockpile. The other side then matched the challenge by diversifying its weapon launch capacity to land, undersea and air. While all this was going on, the nuclear weapons were multiplying. Any skirmish between the two superpowers or between their proxies quickened the pulse of the world as each side boasted of an arsenal that had the potential to destroy the planet many times over. With the demise of communism and collapse of the Soviet Union, the nuclear standoff cooled considerably and the number of weapons greatly reduced. But with the rise of rogue states like Pakistan and North Korea attaining nuclear capability and a resurgent Russia under Putin, they once again begin to assume greater significance. This book is a snapshot of how American politicians and military men handled them for seven decades after World War II. Fred Kaplan is an American author and journalist who has six books to his credit and handles a weekly column ‘War Stories’ for the ‘Slate’ magazine.

Kaplan presents the calm confidence of the US establishment immediately after the world war when Russia did not possess nuclear weapons. This enabled them to casually examine the stakes if nuclear weapons were launched in response to conventional warfare such as in Korea. But the situation didn't stay stagnant for long. The US resolve was tested when Khrushchev tried to deploy Soviet missiles in Cuba. The US posture was belligerent but Kaplan provides details from classified documents that reveal its climb down. President Kennedy reached a secret deal with his Soviet counterpart to dismantle American missiles deployed in Turkey in response to Soviet withdrawal of its own weapons from Cuba.

The unquestioned premise of Cold War nuclear policy was that deterrence required persuading the Soviets that the American president would use nuclear weapons first, in response to aggression against it or its allies in Europe or elsewhere. The NATO member states basked under the nuclear umbrella unfolded by the US. This was essentially an American guarantee to launch nuclear weapons at the Soviet Union in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe even by conventional means. This made the nuclear weapons the centrepiece of Trans-Atlantic security. But the actual fact was that there was no scenario in which using nuclear weapons would give the US or any country an advantage because of the extreme damage caused by a nuclear strike. However tightly they guarded their skies, it was still possible that many of the enemy’s nuclear warheads would hit the homeland. This was the conclusion that every president of the nuclear age and most high level political officials had reached. Yet those presidents and officials also realised that they had to act as if they would use nuclear weapons or else their threats might not be credible in a crisis. On the one hand they wanted the Soviets to think these things would actually be used to ensure deterrence. On the other, they did not want to make a weapon too easy or tempting to use if war broke out. 

The book also points out efforts to stem the tide of brinkmanship. Way back in 1963 itself, the US, USSR and UK signed a treaty outlawing tests of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, under the ocean or in outer space. Contrary to the popular image they had cultivated, we see many truculent presidents adopting a very sane outlook on nuclear issues. Reagan entered the White House with an entourage bent not merely on deterring and containing the Soviet Union but on weakening and rolling back its empire. But once he was assured of the earnestness of Gorbachev, he scaled down his plans and offered drastic cuts in the arsenal. The Soviet Empire was in tatters at the time. Gorbachev realised that the Soviet Union was in shambles, its ideology moribund and its economy dysfunctional. Its military budget consumed nearly all of the government’s resources.

People would normally presume that nuclear weapons being highly destructive, its uses and deployment are most meticulously planned. Kaplan provides stunning details of sloppy preparedness. Each arm of the US military such as the Army, Navy and Air Force fixed their targets in isolation and two targets which may physically be very near so as to suffer lethal damage as the result of a nuclear strike on the other, were given no attention to the offensive redundancy. In 1991, a critical review to weed out redundancy and an imaginative selection of targets was undertaken. As a result, the requirement of nuclear weapons came down from 12,000 to 5,888. This reduction stemmed not from an arms control treaty or relaxation of international tensions, but rather from a purely technical, deep dive analysis of how many weapons US policy required. We see that at the height of the nuclear standoff, the city of Moscow was targeted by 689 nuclear weapons, many releasing more than a megaton of explosive power. By comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had the power of only fifteen kilotons.

The book is easy to read, but too many acronyms and too many characters from the US bureaucracy prove to be a spoilsport. After a while, readers lose track of who’s who with the long line of secretaries, deputy and deputy assistant secretaries dancing before their eyes in the text. The book presents only the American perspective. It includes many references that express doubt on the sanity of decisions taken by the current President, Donald Trump.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star