Involved in many Cold War events, the author became a insider, a nuclear physicist looking right into the dragon's mouth, at the very weapons that made things so chilling and nearly calamitous. This isn't simply an historical narrative; it's also an investigative journalist's exposé of the institutional complex that nurtured a nuclear-arms race almost to our oblivion, while fostering inhuman consequences. Nurturing both sides of the Cold War were mindless military-industrial complexes. No one else has given an account of such intense and personal experience - as technical manager, observer, and activist - insider or outsider. This first-hand narrative chronicles the half-century nuclear crisis: nerve-wracking situations, one global instability to another - tracking the Cold War, its anxieties, controversies, and impact. All of us wittingly or unwittingly had a stake in the nuclear-arms race. My father was a soldier of fortune, a mercenary with a lifelong career serving in American and other armies. When World War II broke out, I was sent to military school, then college. After a bachelor's degree in journalism, obligatory active-duty followed in the Atlantic amphibs: three years as a commissioned officer, partly during the Korean War, in the Reserves for 16 years, eventually the rank of Lieutenant Commander. Attending graduate school under the GI Bill, I became a PhD physicist, entering the esoteric domains of nuclear reactors and weapons - and later arms control and treaty verification. It didn't take long working at a national laboratory to gain a conservative fear of atomic weapons. That gave me a seat at the table - literally lunch at cafeterias of nuclear laboratories, and at the most sensitive facilities of the former Soviet Union, as well as agencies and entities that functioned within the U.S. Gradually I gained access to most nuclear secrets, as well as decades of human inequities and governmental arrogance, unexpectedly becoming an expert in nuclear technology and weapons. In tracking Cold War history, skillful memoirs have been published by individuals who were decision makers, as well as assessments by professional historians. What distinguishes Cold War Brinkmanship is my first-hand role - knowledgeable insider, witness, participant - sometimes an activist and target of FBI investigation (documented under FOIA). Now, I've become an author and a knowledgeable source as the Trump presidency moves along. This personalized narrative tracks the Cold War, its anxieties, controversial issues, and impact. Whether you were a fellow citizen, part of the silent majority or vocal minority, or a conscientious bureaucrat - together we had a stake in the outcome of the frightful and expensive nuclear-arms race. Just a single conscientious mortal decision was (and still is) needed to activate the nuclear "football," to incinerate and radiate. Standing by in every weaponized nuclear nation is someone awaiting the authorization for the chain of command to carry out orders of immense consequence. To hasten World War II's end, such fateful decisions and consequential orders were carried out, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Something similar, or much worse, almost happened during the Cold War Cuban missile crisis. Our children, their children, people around the world: None ought to suffer such traumatic and dangerous times. With pockets of famine, civil injustice, wars of liberation, suicidal ideologies, natural disasters, other global instabilities - who needs a return to Cold War brinkmanship? Decisionmakers, be cautious! Maybe these recollections will demonstrate how difficult it was to contain the nuclear-arms race as it grew more alarming, more expensive, and more consequential. This book is written not by a high-level bureaucrat, but by someone who became a very-well-informed and concerned citizen, anti-war leader, and civil-rights activist.

Vividly written and based on up-to-date scholarship, this title provides an interpretive overview of the international history of the Cold War.

In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.

In numerous crises after World War II—Berlin, Korea, the Taiwan Straits, and the Middle East—the United States resorted to vague threats to use nuclear weapons in order to deter Soviet or Chinese military action. On a few occasions the Soviet Union also engaged in nuclear saber-ratling. Using declassified documents and other sources, this volume examines those crises and compares the decisionmaking processes of leaders who considered nuclear threats with the commonly accepted logic of nuclear deterrence and coercion. Rejecting standard explanations of our leader's logic in these cases, Betts suggests that U.S. presidents were neither consciously blufffing when they made nuclear threats, nor prepared to face the consequences if their threats failed. The author also challenges the myth that the 1950s was a golden age of low vulberability for the United Stateas and details how nuclear parity has, and has not, altered conditions that gave rise to nuclear blackmail in the past.

“An informative and often enthralling book…in the appealing style of Tom Clancy” (Kirkus Reviews) about the 1983 war game that triggered a tense, brittle period of nuclear brinkmanship between the United States and the former Soviet Union. What happened in 1983 to make the Soviet Union so afraid of a potential nuclear strike from the United States that they sent mobile ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) into the field, placing them on a three-minute alert Marc Ambinder explains the anxious period between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1984, with the “Able Archer ’83” war game at the center of the tension. With astonishing and clarifying new details, he recounts the scary series of the close encounters that tested the limits of ordinary humans and powerful leaders alike. Ambinder provides a comprehensive and chilling account of the nuclear command and control process, from intelligence warnings to the composition of the nuclear codes themselves. And he affords glimpses into the secret world of a preemptive electronic attack that scared the Soviet Union into action. Ambinder’s account reads like a thriller, recounting the spy-versus-spy games that kept both countries—and the world—in check. From geopolitics in Moscow and Washington, to sweat-caked soldiers fighting in the trenches of the Cold War, to high-stakes war games across NATO and the Warsaw Pact, “Ambinder’s account of a serious threat of global annihilation…is spellbinding…a masterpiece of recent history” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). The Brink serves as the definitive intelligence, nuclear, and national security history of one of the most precarious times in recent memory and “shows the consequences of nuclear buildups, sometimes-careless language, and nervous leaders. Now, more than ever, those consequences matter” (USA TODAY).

An examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis analyzes the roles, objectives, and actions of John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev during the October 1962 showdown between the U.S. and Soviet Union.

“Contains unsettling insights into some of the most dangerous geopolitical crises of the time.”—The Economist This acclaimed study from the authors of “One Hell of a Gamble” brings to life head-to-head confrontations between the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Drawing on their unrivaled access to Politburo and KGB materials, Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali combine new insights into the Cuban missile crisis as well as startling narratives of the contests for Suez, Iraq, Berlin, and Southeast Asia, with vivid portraits of leaders who challenged Moscow and Washington. Khrushchev’s Cold War provides a gripping history of the crisis years of the Cold War.