To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon's Secret War Plans

by Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod

Book Overview

Provides a startling glimpse into secret U.S. plans to initiate a nuclear war from 1945 to the present. Based on recently declassified Top Secret documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, this book meticulously traces how U.S. policy makers in over a dozen episodes have threatened to initiate a nuclear attack.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0896083217
• ISBN13: 9780896083219
• Release Date: July 1999
• Publisher: South End Press
• Length: 374 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant analysis of US nuclear and military strategy

Some books don't date even when times change. This well-researched, clearly written, extremely scary analysis of US nuclear and military strategy was published in the 1980s, when there was a Red Menace, but its main points remain as valid and alarming today as when it was written. Putting US nuclear strategy and weapons systems decisions in historical context, Axelrod and Kaku (both physics professors, one at Michigan, the other at CCNY) show how US nuclear policy fits into a global warfighting policy aimed at establishing absolute unilateral US dominance in any military conflict. Unlike many military and strategic analyses, the book puts the issues into a larger political and economic context, explaining US military policy as part of a general plan to establish economic control over both poorer third world nations with valuable natural resources and potential wealthy European or Japanese competitors for economic mastery. The book establishes beyond a reasonable doubt, based on careful historical research and declassified government documents, that the US was never satisfied with the nuclear standoff in which nuclear weapons were never to be used because that would lead to global annihilation. Rather, US nuclear policy was a "warfighting" strategy based on the hope that nuclear weapons could be integrated into an "escalation ladder" of credible threats backed by the potential of actual nuclear warfare involving only "acceptable" casualties. The idea of the US strategic planners and the Pentagon, Kaku and Axelrod show, was that conventional and counterinsurgency warfare would be backed by the capacity to use small "tactical" nuclear weapons either if US forces were endangered or to make a terrifying demonstration of US might. The then-Soviet Union would be kept out of such conflicts by the credible treat of a first strike on its missile silos with highly accurate ICBM warheads ("silo-busters") and effective anti-nuclear submarine warfare; some of the residual Soviet nuclear weapons could hopefully be neutralized by ballistic massile defense ("star wars"). Axelrod and Kaku show by case studies how the United States actually threatedned to use nuclear weapons in more than a score of cases that bear out this theory. The alarming thing today is how little has changed. Although the USSR is no more, US policy still plainly seeks to dominate the third world and its economic resources by military might, and to maintain superiority over its allies and potential competitors by essentially the same means, as is shown by the Gulf War of 1990-91 and the current war in Iraq. Work on tactical nuclear weapons, bunker-busters (talked of as possible weapons to be used against Iran in 2003-2006) more accurate ICBMs, and Star Wars -- now supposedly directed at the hypothetical threat from North Korea(!) -- continues at a very expensive pace. Axelrod and Kaku's book remaind essential reading for understanding both the Cold War and current American fo

A book everyone should own!

In a world where information was freely exchanged where the media existed to inform the public on the most important things, this book would be promoted as an essential for any person who claims to be informed. Instead, it is a secret, passed around by the knowledgeable, those not going along with the program, fighters for humanity. From World War Two until the days of the Reagan Star Wars project when this book was written, THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT'S CENTRAL PLAN WAS TO BE ABLE TO LAUNCH A NUCLEAR WAR AGAINST THE SOVIET UNION AND PERHAPS CHINA. This is proved in this book by documentation from United States government documents released through the Freedom of Information Act. In 1947, when the Berlin Crisis broke out, Truman sent the atomic bombers to England to launch war with the Soviet Union, but could not wage war because their were not enough atomic bombs (a chronic problem because until the early 1950s, atomic bombs made by the US only lasted a month). In the 1950s, when Truman recalled McArthur to Wake Island, it was to tell him that there were not enough atomic bombs for wars with both China and the USSR. McArthur could not launch war with China, because the USSR was the priority. It is more widely known that the US offered to rescue the French colonialists from their defeat at Dien Bien Phu with a nuclear attack, but less known that in both the 1967 and 1973 wars, it was Washington's nuclear threats that guaranteed Israeli victories. Those who claim the antiwar movement had no effect will be corrected by this book's coverage of Vietnam. Those of us who heard Nixon claim he had a secret plan to end the war, poh poh it at the time. But he did. He was planning to launch a nuclear attack on the borders of North Vietnam and China and North Vietnam at the end of 1969. He threatened this to the Vietnamese who refused to retreat in their continued struggle for national liberation. In the fall of 1969, Nixon met with his generals and J Edgar Hoover. They told him that the antiwar activity was so strong that his nuclear campaign could not be launched. If it was done, they told him, they would need to bring troops home from Vietnam to fight the opponents of the war here. With the United States bruiting about the world challenging countries it has savaged like Korea and Iran for daring to defend themselves with nuclear weapons, it can never be forgotten that Washington has tried to hold the world through nuclear blackmail since World War II, and that only mechanical failures and political pressures against the advice of Washington has prevented nuclear war. It can never be forgotten that Washington still has enough nuclear weapons to incinerate the planet. One of the most despicable persons on the planet, David Greenglass who aided the government frameup of his own sister and beloved brother-in-law Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, as atomic bomb spies, who claimed he aided Soviet espionage was once asked what he was most ashamed

A great read

I am not reading this book right now, but my significant other is and he can't get enough of it! I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how the U.S. got itself in and out of the situations it has over the last several decades.

The War to End All Wars?

Every time one thinks that the level of evil to which the military-industrial-corporate media can stoop has been reached, along comes more information to tell us we haven't yet reached that level.Authors Kaku and Axelrod have produced a book written in the style I enjoy the most--using the government's own primary source documents to impeach them.They document the insanity of our fathers using their own words to pitch them upon their own pitards.The volume contains quotes from hitherto secret NSC and Joint Chiefs of Staff documents outlining the insantiy, the ends of destruction to which cold war warriors could go to "win" a war with the Soviet Union, or anyone else who dared to stand in the way of American imperialism.Fast forward to the "first strike" of Bush against Iraq. In reading this volume, one can easily find that cold war warriors of the past developed the "first strike" and that Bush and Company have taken advantage of them to establish a Pax Americana by force ofarms to make the Middle East safe for both Israel and American oil and multi-national corporate interests.The authors trace the development of American foreign policy clearly demonstrating to the reader how "crisis" utilized the twin principles of cold war policy development--escalation dominance and first strike--to achieve the goals of American foreign policy--making the world safe for their brand of "freedom."The book traces the evolution of how, in at least a dozen episodes, foreign policy planners used the threat of America's nuclear monopoly to achieve its ends. In contrast to the official party line spewed forth by the corporate media, a series of plans were developed all predicated on the insane notion of "winnig" a nuclear war. "To Win A Nuclear War" is the kind of book to keep at your side when some lard ass flag waver talks about using nuclear weapons for any purpose. If we learn nothing else from history, we should learn that no war is really winnable. Americans are all too eager to inflict this sort of damage as long as it is NIMBY.

a real eye-opener

For those of you who thought Reagan was a bit self-righteous in dubbing the USSR the "evil empire," this book will be a treat. The authors present extensive research which describes the US' sickening foreign policy since WWII and argue that at its heart the whole time was the latest in our nuclear arsenal. Accessible and thought-provoking, this one is a must read for anyone with even a casual interest in the cold war, nuclear weapons, or US foreign policy. Of recent interest, it provides insight on the warmongers (republicans) in congress's reluctance to ratify the CTBT.