Volume 31, Number 21 & 22 · January 17, 1985
How Nuclear War Could Start
By Thomas Powers
The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces
by Paul Bracken
Yale University Press, 252 pp., $19.95
'We all muddled into war,' said Lloyd George of 1914. None of the Great Powers really wanted war; certainly none of them wanted the sort of war they got. Europe had been preparing at great expense for thirty years to fight a big war, but when the war finally commenced the leaders of Europe were amazed all the same. How the war began, and why it occasioned surprise, are among the biggest puzzles of the century. In the 1930s the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm, speaking of Hitler, told an English visitor to Doorn, 'It will run away with him, as it ran away with me.' What was it that 'ran away,' exactly? Why did Lloyd George describe as a 'muddle' something that was planned in advance in great detail and that unfolded, in the event, precisely in accord with those plans?
Review, 4599 words
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