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Going MAD - Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Paperback)
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Going MAD - Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Paperback)
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This deathbed memoir by Dr. Paul H. Johnstone, former senior
analyst in the Strategic Weapons Evaluation Group (WSEG) in the
Pentagon and a co-author of The Pentagon Papers, provides an
authoritative analysis of the implications of nuclear war that
remain insurmountable today. Indeed, such research has been kept
largely secret, with the intention "not to alarm the public" about
what was being cooked up. This is the story of how U.S. strategic
planners in the 1950s and 1960s worked their way to the conclusion
that nuclear war was unthinkable. It drives home these key
understandings: That whichever way you look at it, and this book
shows the many ways analysts tried to skirt the problem, nuclear
war means mutual destruction; That Pentagon planners could accept
the possibility of totally destroying another nation, while taking
massive destructive losses ourselves, and still conclude that "we
would prevail"; That the supposedly "scientific answers" provided
to a wide range of unanswerable questions are of highly dubious
standing; That official spheres neglect anything near a comparable
effort to understand the "enemy" point of view, rather than to
annihilate him, or to use such understanding to make peace; Dr.
Johnstone's memoirs of twenty years in the Pentagon tell that story
succinctly, coolly and objectively. He largely lets the facts speak
for themselves, while commenting on the influence of the Cold War
spirit of the times and its influence on decision-makers. Johnstone
writes: "Theorizing about nuclear war was a sort of virtuoso
exercise in creating an imaginary world wherein all statements must
be consistent with each other, but nothing need be consistent with
reality because there was no reality to be checked against." While
remaining highly secret, so much so that Dr. Johnstone himself was
denied access to what he had written, these studies had a major
impact on official policy. They contributed to a shift from the
notion that the United States could inflict "massive retaliation"
on its Soviet enemy to recognition that a nuclear exchange would
bring about Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). The alarming truth
today is that these lessons seem to have been forgotten in
Washington, just as United States policy has become as hostile to
Russia as it was toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. U.S.
foreign policy is pursuing hostile encirclement of two major
nuclear powers, Russia and China. Without public debate, apparently
without much public interest, the United States is preparing to
allocate a trillion dollars over the next thirty years to modernize
its entire nuclear arsenal. It is as if all that was once
understood about the danger of nuclear war has been forgotten.
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