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

by Fred Kaplan

Most presidents come to realize that nothing in their lives has quite prepared them for the weighty rigors of the Oval Office. Most react to the shock by hunkering down with their briefing books, listening to experts, convening their top advisers, consulting their predecessors, asking questions, balancing options, and developing a keen awareness of their own styles of thinking: their strengths and limits. Trump seemed never to reach that moment of awakening. He never thought he needed to learn much beyond what he already knew. To Trump, everything was a deal, deals depended on personal relations, and he navigated the nexus between the two through the finely tuned nerve endings of his gut. The bomb—the weapon of fire and fury that Trump threatened to rain down on North Korea to punish its leader and obliterate the entire nation—has coexisted with humanity for three quarters of a century with no catastrophes, as yet, since the two explosions, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that set the nuclear age in motion. Still, all along, the generals and their aides have kept churning out war plans and calculating the consequences on our side versus their side—the targets destroyed, the cities ravaged, the millions of people killed—spinning them in a way that might yield some kind of victory. They have seen this as their job: to seek ways to make these weapons usable, in case the commander-in-chief wanted to use them.