This is the classic insider's description of the most dangerous nuclear crisis in US history. Kennedy's first person narrative is dramatic, gripping, moving, frightening and fascinating. The best place to start on nuclear weapons.

Very highly recommended. If you read nothing else, read this.

The first and still most important work on nuclear strategy. Brody is also one of the top two Cold War prose stylists. He and George Kennan were the two best writers working in the foreign policy field in the 50s and 60s. Who else but Brody could begin a book intended largely for an audience of Air Force officers about the "absolute weapon" with an extended quotation from Milton's Paradise Lost? And he's very, very smart. Many of his ideas became the foundations for what is thought about nuclear weapons and strategy today.

Very highly recommended. (Required, actually.)

This is the classic book positing the importance of game theory to nuclear war. Schelling is very smart, writes in wonderful prose, and has tremendously coercive arguments. But I've never been comfortable with the notion that game theory has very much relevance to nuclear war (the notion of a "rational actor" in the midst of the hell that would be nuclear war seems unlikely to me) and in the last couple of years I've come to have fundamental doubts about his description of nuclear threats. He is one of the giants of the field and widely respected, however.

This is an amazing book which won the Bancroft Prize for excellence in historical writing. It is the story of American attitudes toward air power and strategic bombing in the period before, during and just after World War II. Sherry examines how theorists and military men came to believe that strategic bombing could be a significant factor in war. The lessons apply directly to nuclear war and nuclear weapons.

This is a well-researched, careful, factual piece of historical work that should be read by everyone who thinks about nuclear weapons. It is profoundly important and wise.

With the highest recommendation.

This is the best  book to read on nuclear threats: clear, detailed, concise. He concludes that even during the "Golden Age" of nuclear threats (the Eisenhower years) the likelihood that nuclear threats were effective is quite small.

Very good. Recommended.

Herman Kahn was supposed to have been the smartest man of his generation: he had an IQ that measured higher than anyone else's. Louis Menand says that Kahn had a talent for capturing the conventional thinking of his day. Freeman Dyson says that Kahn was a very pleasant man in person. A good person to know.

This book is often mentioned as one of the foundational books of nuclear strategy. I have to confess that I've never come across an idea of Kahn's that I thought was right. His writing is extraordinarily long-winded, the ideas in it are rational but not sensible, and I have to confess that I've never felt very rewarded by the time I've invested in Kahn's works. I did once arrive at an important conviction because I read a passage of Kahn's that I totally disagreed with. So there may be some merit in looking at his writing - if only to see what people were saying inside the think tanks in the early sixties.

Blackett was a physicist and socialist in the British government in the 1950s. His books contain enormous sense. There are more important ideas in here than in ten other books from the same time period.

Recommended highly.

Most of what is sensible and smart in the work that I have done comes from the ideas of Freeman Dyson. An outstanding physicist and for more than forty years a member of the top secret group of scientists who advise the government on futuristic weapons (JASON), Dyson has thought long and deeply about nuclear weapons. His suggestion that they might not be terribly useful has become a cornerstone of my work. I respect Dyson a great deal and believe his thought in this field is sound and extraordinarily insightful.

Very highly recommended. (Caveat: Dyson is a friend and mentor.)

Hiroshima is the central event in the history of nuclear weapons. It determines most of our attitudes and shapes our fears and feelings. Hasagawa is that extraordinary historian who reads English, Russian and Japanese. He's done original research in all three of the archives of the major players and his book is invaluable, therefore.

I don't agree with his thesis that the US/Russian competition was the primary motivator behind many of the decisions taken around the time of the dropping the Bomb. But his research and grasp of the sources makes this book invaluable to anyone studying Hiroshima.

Richard Frank is an amateur historian, but he was a professional jurist before taking up the study of history. His account of the last days of Japan is factual, carefully documented and even-handed in its presentation of the evidence. His writing style is plain-spoken and engaging. This is probably the best book to read about Hiroshima if you're only going to read one book.

A word about his conclusions: I think he's entirely wrong. Frank argues that the bomb of Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have been the reason why Japan surrendered. He makes a masterful and careful case, but it is not persuasive.

Recommended.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is the most important crisis in the history of nuclear weapons. Allison's analysis is fascinating because he goes over the same material three different times from three different perspectives. It is a historical tour de force and should not be missed.

Recommended.

Laurence Freedman's book is a classic. He talks about the development of nuclear strategy in this magisterial work on history. He is careful, fair-minded, and covers a broad sweep of intellectual history. It's not clear that this book will help you to know what you think about nuclear weapons - help you arrive at a judgment about them. But it will allow you to see where others have been in their thinking.

Recommended.

Peter Scoblic delivers a trenchant analysis of conservative political thought since the mid-1950s and how it impacted foreign policy in general and nuclear weapons policy in particular. His writing is lucid and graceful; his ideas are smart and perceptive.

Recommended. (Caveat: Peter is a friend of mine.)

Robert O'Connell writes about the large sweep of war from the ancient Egyptians to the present day. I think his analysis is sometimes muddled, but he writes well and he sometimes has flashes of creativity that are startling. He has ideas that are very powerful and I appreciate the effort he puts in to try to say something new. Like an Irishman improvising wildly on a fiddle: some of the attempts don't work out, but some of the trills and flourishes are arresting, original and amazingly insightful.

For example: O'Connell argues that war is a continuum of activities that have swung back and forth (like a pendulum) throughout history. At one extreme is the courtly, rule-bound, honor-driven combat of the knightly period in European history: dropped handkerchiefs, pauses to allow one's opponent to regain his saddle, and flowery compliments to the defeated. At the other is the win-at-all costs, slaughter-them-all combat of the Mongols in the 1220s. (Genghiz Kahn once killed all the inhabitants of a city except for a select handful. These he kept alive and after his troops had withdrawn from the city, he allowed them to go from street to street calling out that the Mongols were gone. Once people came out of hiding, his troops came storming back in, killed them all, and the handful he had kept alive to call them out of hiding were killed as well.) Over time warfare in different parts of the world has resembled first one end of the spectrum, then the other. [One of the reasons it is so difficult to come up with a single definition of what war is, is that the kind of activity it is has swung back and forth over time and across regions.]

Very though-provoking. Recommended.

This is a masterful study of the differences between violence, power, authority, strength and force. Arendt is one of the most poweful political thinkers of the twentieth century and it shows in this very short and very useful analysis of the relationship between power and violence.

Highly recommended.

This hour plus video interview with former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara (they actually did many more hours of filming) is a fascinating look inside the head of one government officials at the heart of the nuclear weapons buildup in the United States. McNamara did his job relatively unreflectively and then spent the next forty years thinking back over his decisions (and the decisions of governments he was a part of) with considerable self-criticism. It is a remarkable and fascinating documentary of discussions with one of the men who shaped the arsenals we have today.

The Cuban missile crisis is the most important crisis in nuclear weapons history. These transcripts provide fine-grained historical detail that is by turns boring and spell-binding but always important. Watching these men feeling their way, under enormous stress, with insufficient information (and some of it wrong) is intriguing.