NUCLEAR MYTHOLOGY AND NUCLEAR USELESSNESS

Abstract

Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons, by Ward Wilson. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. 188 pages, $22.

Keywords:

• Deterrence
• nuclear weapons
• Hiroshima
• Nagasaki

Notes

1. Spencer R. Weart, The Rise of Nuclear Fear (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

2. See, especially, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005); and Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).

3. Michael D. Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

4. See Gordin, Five Days in August, chapter 6. The Smyth Report remains in print: Henry DeWolf Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989).

5. See, for example, the 1946 quotation from Stalin reproduced in Michael D. Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), p. 10; and the analysis of Mao in Sean L. Malloy, “A ‘Paper Tiger?‘ Nuclear Weapons, Atomic Diplomacy, and the Korean War,” New England Journal of History 60 (Fall 2003-Spring 2004), pp. 227–52.