Word: thermonuclear
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This is hardly a take-it-or-leave-book for two reasons: (1) its content which, in discussing the actual prospects of thermonuclear war rather than leaving that cataclysm as a horrifying abstraction, is highly controversial, and (2) its length precludes any but the most interested from reading substantial portions...
Both the "mutual annihilation" vision and the automatic-deterrence strategy come under tough-minded bombardment in a newly published book, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton University; $10), which already is the talk of military thinkers across the U.S. Author: Herman Kahn, 38, senior staff physicist of the RAND Corp., the Air Force "think factory" headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif. One result of the idea that nuclear war is "unthinkable" is that too few men think about it in a serious way. But Kahn, consultant for the Atomic Energy Commission and the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, has spent much...
...January, 1951, just after President Truman had issued his directive to determine the technical feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon, I was appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission. I recall that Professor Rabi and some of his confreres on the General Advisory Council were profoundly wrong at that time, both in their scientific estimates about the feasibility and practicability of the new weapon. It turned out later that the Soviet Union was no more than six months behind us in nuclear technology. Their thermonuclear or H-bomb test was made, in fact, only about six months after ours...
...their initial working paper last spring the Committees suggested "destruction of thermonuclear weapons" as an "independent American initiative." In the final Statement, however, the passages on unilateral disarmament were omitted; the new emphasis is on "unilateral steps toward disarmament." For purposes of comparison, the working paper position of unilateral disarmament is included the following text, set off in and small type...
Weapon developments of the past decade have swiftly and decisively altered the nature of war. Only within the past five years have thermonuclear weapons been tested from airplanes. Intercontinental missiles have been tested only during the past three years. We are now constructing long-range submarines, each autonomous, each able to obliterate more than a dozen cities. In a score of countries, reactors are now producing plutonium, a nuclear explosive. We cannot long entrust our lives to small numbers of men with the means of mass death at their fingertips, men filled with fear and conditioned to accept without question...