Volume 36, Number 1 · February 2, 1989
Do Nuclear Weapons Matter?
By Stanley Hoffmann
Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years
by McGeorge Bundy
Random House, 735 pp., $24.95
McGeorge Bundy has written an exceptionally important book. When, in 1969, he left the presidency of the Ford Foundation in order to teach history at New York University, he decided to combine his lifelong academic interest in the study of American foreign policy and his experience both on the edges of government (he had helped Henry L. Stimson, FDR's secretary of war, write his memoirs, and been the secretary of the 1952 Oppenheimer panel on arms and policy) and in power as national security adviser of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. For nine years, he worked on a book which, he tells us, is 'about political choices in the fifty years of man-made nuclear fission.' It is not about all such choices, but about those that he deems important and that he thinks he can discuss in an informed and useful way.
Review, 6100 words
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