New Books In World Affairs

Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that’s exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book, The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age (Cornell UP, 2022). The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with th