| Description |
302 pages ; 24 cm |
| Contents |
Harnessing doom -- American ways of thinking -- Sidelining the unthinkable -- Intellectual dislocations of the Cold War -- The halting leap forward -- Selective nostalgia |
| Summary |
"September 11 was a product of bad intelligence and wrongheaded expectations about al-Qaeda's motivations, intentions, resourcefulness, and capabilities. But it also sprang from a failure of the kind of predictive strategic deliberation that had kept the world from becoming atomic rubble in the fifties and sixties. What was it about the strategic thinking of the Cold War era that we got right?" |
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"Stevenson traces the recent evolution of constructive apocalyptic thinking from its zenith in the early nuclear era, when giants like Albert Wohlstetter, Thomas C. Schelling, and Herman Kahn rewrote military strategy to accommodate the hydrogen bomb. He shows that in one of those ironies of history, it was the very successes of the Cold War that spawned many of the intellectual habits that keep our focus insular and our context narrowly national. While we didn't blow each other up, there was plenty that the Cold War strategists got wrong (Vietnam, for instance) or failed to anticipate - in particular, the emergence of Islamist terrorists as a major threat to the United States and its partners."--BOOK JACKET |
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"The short answer is that deterrence had worked: the prospect of nuclear devastation made its avoidance the undisputed top priority for both Washington and Moscow. At the same time, the rank unacceptability of Soviet communism to Americans and American democratic capitalism to Soviets made each side view the other as the consuming foe that dwarfed all others. In Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable, strategic analyst Jonathan Stevenson illuminates the genius of nuclear deterrence and mutual assured destruction (MAD), as well as the blind spots that limited the great Cold War civilian strategists' intellectual fertility and flexibility." |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-288) and index |
| Subject |
Cold War.
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Deterrence (Strategy)
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Nuclear weapons -- Government policy -- United States -- History.
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War on Terrorism, 2001-2009.
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| LC no. |
2007043554 |
| ISBN |
9780670019014 |
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