To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction

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.

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.

Edward Kaplan has written a first-rate account of the evolution of America's air-atomic strategy, a subject overlooked by contemporary scholars and policymakers and, most important of all, airmen themselves. Drawing on a wide variety of literatures that inform the study of airpower, nuclear deterrence, and the Cold War, he carefully examines the puzzles that plagued the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations as they struggled to come to terms with the advent of atomic weapons and the conduct of war. As the title implies, the story here is nothing less than the killing of nations; this is a topic neglected at our peril. This book should be read by all those interested in airpower, nuclear strategy, war, and peace.

While the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine had genuine logical robustness internally, it looked (and indeed was) totally insane the moment one stepped just a millimeter outside of it. And everyone had to live with that-not just the Air Force but everyone inside the national security community in Washington, DC. In To Kill Nations, Edward Kaplan makes clear the distinction between articulated, presidential-level declaratory policy and the military planning process, which may stay within the boundaries of the former and may not. The military will always have its own imperatives and institutional drivers. Unless policymakers keep on top of these, they will risk losing control of what actually goes on in planning. Kaplan emphasizes this reality in his detailed history of early U.S. nuclear war planning.

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.