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

by Fred Kaplan

This was the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld line: as long as the North Koreans were pursuing nuclear weapons, even to sit down with them would be an act of appeasement, succumbing to blackmail, rewarding bad behavior. Cheney once put it this way: “We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.” Cheney was the prime mover in all these campaigns for regime change and for the resistance to diplomacy. Those who knew him from his days as secretary of defense, during the presidency of Bush’s father, were puzzled by his evolution from conservative but competent manager to blazing ideologue. Some attributed his tectonic shift in views to the 9/11 attacks; others thought the end of the Cold War, leaving America as “the sole superpower,” galvanized his imperial ambitions; still others wondered whether his heart attack shortly after the 2000 election—his fourth—might have finally done some slight damage to the flow of oxygen to his brain. Colin Powell, who had worked alongside him in the Pentagon, told friends that Cheney hadn’t changed at all: the difference was that, in his former job, he’d had “adult supervision”; now, with George W. ceding him authority on national security matters, he was in charge.