10 books like The Button

More recent than Kaplan’s Wizards and more episodic but making it clear how close we came to destruction in the Cold War. With journalistic flair, he drives the narrative with real hair-raising episodes most notably a blow-by-blow account of an accident at a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas, in 1980. It’s a book that every student should read as the new generation needs to know how close to disaster we came in between 1947 and 1991 and the world could easily revert into a new Cold War. 

Russia and the U.S. each possess a Doomsday Machine: a weapon that could wipe out our species. If either launched their thousands of nuclear ICMBs, that would probably doom us, even if the other did not retaliate. So argues Ellsberg, who confesses his role in creating the menace.  (None of the seven other nuclear nations have more than a few hundred, as a deterrent.) The book’s invaluable history includes multiple occasions when either Russia or the U.S. came perilously close to triggering Armageddon. When I was flying in the Strategic Air Command, we launched three times. Barely before it was too late, we were recalled. But that was before ICMBs; ICMBs can not be recalled. Read this book and spread its message.

Kaplan does a marvelous job describing, as the subtitle indicates, “the secret history of nuclear war.” It is in a sense a sequel to Kaplan’s earlier The Wizards of Armageddon, which examined theorists of nuclear annihilation. In The Bomb, Kaplan takes us on a deep dive into the bowels of actual doomsday planning; an unforgettable and darkly educational trip!

I was privileged to know Marty Sherwin in person. He was the friendliest person ever with a tremendous sense of humour – and a magnificent, honest scholar.

He was the friendliest person ever with a tremendous sense of humour – and a magnificent, honest scholar. History, as Paul Ricoeur has reminded, is not a record to be played. The Cold War nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, and mainly, the Cuban missile crisis did not have to end as they did, peacefully.

When two A bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945, a genie was released that the world will not be able to get rid of any time soon. Martin J. Sherwin, the doyen of American nuclear historians always argued that this did not have to be so. Nuclear technology could have been placed under international supervision and arms race and proliferation could have been… show more.

A lot of work on nuclear politics focuses on the policies and strategies of the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia. This book goes beyond that. The scope of Narang’s Nuclear Strategy is immense. It’s really two books in one. The first tells me why states adopt the nuclear posture—the doctrine and number of weapons—that they do. It’s a one-stop shop for learning about the origins and evolution of nuclear policy in China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, and South Africa. Then I read on and find Narang goes further. The second book shows me the consequences of those decisions for conflict. The lessons of the book travel, and I find myself applying the nuclear posture categories that Narang identifies when thinking about nuclear developments today. 

I struggled to balance recent books that explore nuclear politics with the benefit of decades of history and earlier foundational books. Picking only one from the latter category may be a mistake. Thomas Schelling’s Strategy of Conflict, Robert Jervis’s Theory of the Nuclear Revolution, and many others deserve mention. I included Absolute Weapon because it was the earliest attempt to explore what nuclear weapons meant for international politics. It is best remembered for Brodie’s contention that victory in nuclear war is meaningless, and so the central purpose of nuclear weapons is deterrence. Yet Brodie grapples—at times suggesting divergent answers—with many enduring questions: the requirements for deterrence, the prospects for meaningful superiority, and the potential for superiority (to say nothing of monopoly) to offer political advantages or spur aggression. 

I got this book for the incisive presentation and critique of the nuclear revolution thesis. I stayed for the original theory and detailed history. The chapters on the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations provided me with a new understanding of that era. For the nuclear revolution, the superpower behavior of the late Cold War was either irrational or driven by domestic pathologies. Green shows that there was a cold strategic logic and domestic political awareness behind U.S. policy. American leaders tailored arms control in ways that allowed them to continue competing and indeed gain an advantage against the Soviet Union.

Connolly’s book traces recent historical shifts in artists’ cinema via a number of overlapping trends; multi-screen video projections in galleries, work that ‘references an earlier event through documentation, re-enactment or remaking’ and that which explores the relationship between cinema, screen architecture, and the museum or gallery space. The implications of these trends; the mobile as opposed to seated spectator or the making of work designed to run as continuous short loops, is considered via detailed discussion of works by a small number of key artists. Connolly, unusually and refreshingly, is not afraid to criticise, as in her discussion of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film Zidane. 

The concept of life and death after a world war is given a twist when cold and darkness are more lethal than nuclear, chemical, or biological residues. Many of the most prominent characters are civilian airline pilots and other aviation professionals. I’ve spent much of my life around military and civil aviation. I don’t encounter characters like these very frequently. I like the way the author drew upon the knowledge and skills of these people to save humanity’s future.

On a basic level, this is a book about nuclear weapons and why humanity ought to eschew them. But it is also much more than that.

Published on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, this masterpiece examines three foreseeable scenarios for the human race: the end of human life, a decline to barbarism after a disastrous decrease of the world’s population, and a unification of the world under a single government.

Russell describes how “pride, arrogance and fear of loss of face have obscured the power of judgment.” This is sadly no less true today, as the emotionality of human beings continues to strongly influence international relations.