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...Mandelbaum defines friction as "the innumerable unforeseen and unpredictable difficulties that crop up..." Examples of this friction include Congressional concern with Soviet weapons deployment, bureaucratic infighting over weapons procurement, other countries' foreign policy goals, and even the different strategic theories of the U.S. military services...

Author: By Thomas M. Levenson, | Title: Nuke This Book | 10/13/1979 | See Source »

That is, everything that does not fit into Mandelbaum's idyllic vision of a cabal of national security advisors and independent rational strategists setting policy gets relegated to the analytical ash-heap of "friction...

Author: By Thomas M. Levenson, | Title: Nuke This Book | 10/13/1979 | See Source »

Hence, the rabid anti communism of the late 40s and 50s never appears in this book; presumably the widely-held belief that the world was rife with commies had no impact on U.S. military strategy. Presumably the Korean war raised no questions about the use of nuclear weapons; Mandelbaum asserts only that Eisenhower's veiled references to The Bomb helped end the war. Presumably, in writing the history of American strategic thought in the last three decades, the Vietnam war is worth no more than a paragraph of simplistic analysis; for Mandelbaum the war was "first a laboratory...then...

Author: By Thomas M. Levenson, | Title: Nuke This Book | 10/13/1979 | See Source »

Well thank you for letting us know. Actually most of what happened since 1945 is given short shrift in this book as Mandelbaum focuses on the strategic role played by Kennedy and McNamara in the nuclear debate. But though Mandelbaum manages to give a fairly competent review of the bare bones of the strategic disputes of the Kennedy administration, he persists in understanding policy development as the province of a very few, very talented men. Thank heaven for the best and the brightest...

Author: By Thomas M. Levenson, | Title: Nuke This Book | 10/13/1979 | See Source »

ULTIMATELY, Mandelbaum simply believes in different myths than most of the rest of us. He still believes, it seems from this book, that policy development is a coherent, discrete process; that America of the 40s and 50s was a disinterested defender of democracy and world peace; that America as a whole could be considered as a whole; that consensus still reigned in American politics in the crucial years of the nuclear debate...

Author: By Thomas M. Levenson, | Title: Nuke This Book | 10/13/1979 | See Source »

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