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From the author of the classic The Wizards of Armageddon and Pulitzer Prize finalist comes the definitive history of American policy on nuclear war \\u2014 and Presidents\\u2019 actions in nuclear crises \\u2014 from Truman to Trump. Fred Kaplan takes us into the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs of Staff\\u2019s \\u201cTank\\u201d in the Pentagon, and the vast chambers of Strategic Command to bring us the untold stories \\u2014 based on exclusive interviews and previously classified documents \\u2014 of how America\\u2019s presidents and generals have thought about, threatened, broached, and just barely avoided nuclear war from the dawn of the atomic age until today. Kaplan\\u2019s historical research and deep reporting will stand as the permanent record of politics. Discussing theories that have dominated nightmare scenarios from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kaplan presents the unthinkable in terms of mass destruction and demonstrates how the nuclear war reality will not go away, regardless of the dire consequences. Shermer and Kaplan also discuss:

• Dr. Strangelove
• The Doomsday Machine
• Mutual Assured Destruction
• game theory and the logic of deterrence
• proliferation, non-proliferation, and the evolution of nuclear weapons and strategy
• North Korea and why Kim Jong Un is not a madman
• President Trump and how he has reminded us that The Bomb is here to stay
• Israel and Iran
• Reagan and Gorbachev
• how conventional wars can escalate to nuclear war\\u2026but haven\\u2019t\\u2026yet, and
• why we will never get to Nuclear Zero.

Fred Kaplan is the national-security columnist for Slate and the author of five previous books, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestseller), 1959: The Year Everything Changed, Daydream Believers, and The Wizards of Armageddon. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Brooke Gladstone.

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