Word: mandelbaums
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...publisher describes The Nuclear Question as a "valuable book for anyone who wishes to understand better the nuclear issues of our time." Directed at the "general reader," the book looms threatening because Mandelbaum has written a history that reads like your sixth grade civics textbook. Like your sixth grade civics textbook, it consists of equal parts myth and omission...
...Mandelbaum seems overawed by the basic stuff of his topic: the awesome and ever-increasing destructiveness of nuclear weapons--with some justification. But consequently Mandelbaum has treated all the actors as larger and simpler than life. The bomb death; the U.S. good; Clauswitz...
...Mandelbaum portrays his work as "the story of the evolution of the best of all possible nuclear worlds...." Mandelbaum says nuclear strategy to 961 evolved through a calm reasoned discussion by scientists, strategists, and even dispassionate top-echelon government personnel. And when Mandelbaum's United States faces nuclear challenges, it rises as a monolithic community combining unanimity on strategic questions with general agreement on foreign policy goals...
...Mandelbaum, the United States, whether demanding international control of nuclear arms, or bilateral restraint in their deployment, always acted from the purest of motives. And always the United States stands as an awesome benevolent entity facing the inscrutable and probably evil Soviet Bear. Mandelbaum sees American leadership as identical to America and thus assumes that their directions and motives reflect the unanimous sentiment of the American people...
...because nuclear strategy was developed by wise men in accordance with the wise and ancient principles of diplomacy and war, the real world does not intrude. Mandelbaum turns to Clauswitz, his hero, for a pigeonhole in which to sequester all the troublesome events of the last three decades, and uncovers the concept of "friction...