Volume 30, Number 4 · March 17, 1983
A Matter of Survival
By McGeorge Bundy
The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy
by Lawrence Freedman
St. Martin's Press, 473 pp., $10.95 (paper)
The Soviet Union and the Arms Race
by David Holloway
Yale University Press, 211 pp., $14.95
As the United States faces a series of tangled and potentially divisive choices in its policy toward nuclear weapons, these books by young British scholars make serious contributions to our understanding of central elements of the problem. Lawrence Freedman tells us the history of our good and bad thoughts about nuclear strategy, and David Holloway describes more briefly the history of nuclear strategy on the Soviet side. Each has mastered a formidable and often opaque 'literature.' Both have been respectful of the record but bold in judging it, and they write with a clarity and fairness that are distressingly rare in American debates. Neither is peddling a panacea, and citizens trying to find a sensible course between unilateral disarmament and the miscellaneous nuclear expansionism of the Reagan administration will find solid help from both. Moreover, each author is meticulous in giving credit to those on whose works he builds, so that each book is not only a free-standing work of analysis but also an excellent guide to further study.
Review, 4365 words
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