Command and Control

During my research for Command and Control, I spoke to Pentagon officials from every postwar administration, except that of President Harry Truman. But my understanding of the Cold War owes much to the work of historian John Lewis Gaddis, most notably his recent biography, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), and his synthesis of more than thirty years studying the conflict, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2007). The opening of archives in the former Soviet Union has added a much-needed new perspective to events long narrowly viewed from the American side, and a number of books have supplanted earlier histories or added important new details. I learned much from Vojtech Mastny’s The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) and from two excellent books by Alexsandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali: Khruschchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) and “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

Some of the most compelling books about the Cold War have been written by people who helped to wage it. For the Truman years, I strongly recommend the deeply personal works of James Forrestal and David E. Lilienthal — Walter Millis, ed. The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking Press, 1951) and The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Volume II: The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). One of the most perceptive observers of President Eisenhower’s strategic thinking was McGeorge Bundy. But his epic book — Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988) — is less trustworthy about the Kennedy administration in which Bundy served. I also learned a great deal from books by Kenneth D. Nichols, a strong proponent of nuclear weapons, and by Herbert F. York, a former head of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory who came to doubt their usefulness. Nichols’s memoir is The Road to Trinity: A Personal Account of How America’s Nuclear Policies Were Made (New York: William Morrow, 1987), and York wrote two books about his experiences, Race to Oblivion: A Participant’s View of the Arms Race (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970) and Making Weapons, Talking Peace: A Physicist’s Odyssey from Hiroshima to Geneva (New York: Basic Books, 1987). Thomas C. Reed, a nuclear weapons designer and close adviser to Ronald Reagan, wrote a blunt, fascinating account of the Cold War’s final chapter, At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004). The Cold War memoir that I found to be the most interesting and revelatory was written by Robert M. Gates, the former secretary of defense and director of the CIA: From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).

Two classic texts offer a good introduction to the origins and explosive power of nuclear weapons: Henry DeWolf Smyth’s Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb Under the Auspices of the United States Government 1940–1945: (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945) and The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), edited by Samuel Glasstone. More than twenty-five years after being published, The Making of the Atomic Bomb remains the definitive work on the Manhattan Project. I also learned a great deal about the development of the first nuclear weapons from Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), by Lillian Hoddeson, Paul W. Henriksen, Roger A. Meade, and Catherine Westfall. The weapons themselves are described with unparalleled accuracy in John Coster-Mullen’s book, Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man (Waukesha, WI: John Coster-Mullen, 2009). David Samuels profiles Coster-Mullen and his indefatigable research methods in “Atomic John: A Truck Driver Uncovers Secrets About the First Nuclear Bombs,” The New Yorker, December 15, 2008.

Chuck Hansen’s The Swords of Armageddon, a digital collection released by Chuklea Publications in 2007, is by far the most impressive work on the technical aspects of nuclear weapons. Spanning seven volumes and more than three thousand pages, it is based almost entirely on documents that Hansen obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Many of the documents are included verbatim, and they cover almost every aspect of nuclear weapon design. The only sources that I found to be more reliable than Hansen were people who’d actually designed nuclear weapons.