This book is scary. It's fascintating, intelligent, and witty too, but mostly it's scary. We are a nation at peace with being at war. How did we get that way? Maddow lays it out for us, from LBJ and Vietnam to Reagan and the Iran-Contra scandal to today's status quo of contracting out our national defense.

I'm not sure what the scariest part of this book is. The tendency for presidential (rather than Congressional) control of defense is alarming (and unconstitutional), as is the amount of money spent on defense compared to all other programs. I learned a lot about Reagan's defense actions that I was too young to notice as it was happening (and that history seems to have forgotten). And details about Dick Cheyney show just how small DC political circles are. But the scariest stuff might be the parts where Maddow describes our country's aging nuclear weapon stockpile, built 40-50 years ago with a shelf-life of 10-20 years. Lots of the weapons have mold on the wings and we can't fix some of the broken ones because the people who used to work on them left and nobody ever wrote anything down. Eek.

Or maybe it's that overall, the US admits to having lost track of 11 nuclear bombs over the years. And we keep better track than most countries. I wonder if the nuclear warhead that fell off of a plane in 1961 and buried itself in a swampy field in Faro, North Carolina counts as one of the 11. Because we know where it is, but we couldn't get it out, so we just left it there and told the farmers not to dig deeper than 5 feet below the surface. Yikes.

Or maybe the saddest to me is that in the past decade, the US Army has lost more soldiers to suicide than to enemy fire in Afghanistan.

Scary and sad.