The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

But Trump was a symptom, not the cause, of our common nuclear problem. At the dawn of the Republic, James Madison wrote in The Federalist No. 10, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” which is why he and the other Founders devised checks and balances to a potential autocrat’s power—a legislature, judiciary, free press, and (they hoped) an educated public. At the dawn of the nuclear age, Harry Truman wrested control of the bomb away from the generals, entrusting it to the top civilian authority, because he understood that, as he put it, “this isn’t a military weapon.” But neither Truman nor anyone since devised checks or balances to the fears, whims, or impulses of the unenlightened statesman whose rise Madison feared as inevitable. Just months after Hiroshima, Bernard Brodie, one of the pioneering nuclear strategists at the RAND Corporation, a scholar who lacked the ambition or temperament to move into official circles, wrote, “Everything about the atomic bomb is overshadowed by the twin facts that it exists and that its destructive power is fantastically great.” The story of the bomb ever since has been—and will continue to be—the story of presidents and generals grappling with these twin facts, figuring out the best way to maneuver around them or to reconcile with them.