Books like Cornerstones of Security — picked by fans

Jacobsen’s terrifying account of how rapidly global nuclear destruction can happen is why I’ve already recommended it to many colleagues and friends. It reminded me of Jonathon Schell’s The Fate of the Earth that was one of the factors in my decision to join the Bethlehem Peace Pilgrimage.

By describing the interlocking U.S. launch detection, command and control, and delivery systems, Nuclear War provides readers with a realistic series of events that demonstrate the dangers of maintaining nuclear arsenals. Even though I have read scores of books regarding nuclear weapons over the last 45 years, this book gave me new insights and renewed my sense of urgency to achieve a world without these destructive weapons.

I love this book because it tells the story of individuals working on a complicated and unprecedented problem. In December 1991, an independent Ukraine suddenly became the state with the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world. What should its leaders do? Forever after, political scientists have debated a question in the abstract: “Should Ukraine keep its nukes”?

After Russia’s partial invasion in 2014 and full-out invasion in 2022, the question was, “Should Ukraine have kept its nukes?” And Budjeryn does a fantastic job demonstrating how the reality was far more complicated than that framing. It was a messy path to the 1992 Lisbon Protocol and 1994 Budapest Memorandum, by which Ukraine joined the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 1991 START agreement.

Budjeryn focuses on the human element and an era of uncertainty. I commend this book to anyone who concludes from Russia’s brutality in Ukraine: this is a… show more.

Togzhan Kassenova’s book tells the story of one of the overlooked crimes of the twentieth century: the Soviet Union’s assault on Kazakhstan through careless nuclear testing—this devasted generations of Kazakhs and other non-Russian people. Kassenova also shows the terrifying prospects of what the collapse of the Soviet Union could have entailed.

There were unexploded nuclear devices buried underground and unguarded highly-enriched uranium that very bad people wanted to acquire to build their own bombs. Motivated by its history as a nuclear playground, Kazakhstan contributed to one of the great miracles of our time: the non-proliferation of the massive Soviet nuclear stockpile (some 27,000 warheads at the end of the Cold War) throughout the 1990s. Policymakers rightly worry about states like Iran and North Korea—as they rightly worried about Libya and Iraq in the 1990s and early 2000s.

For the most part, the AQ Khan network—not the Soviet arsenal—made those fears… show more.

I recommend this book because it tells the inside story of what it is like to actually negotiate and get a nuclear arms accord ratified. The word “negotiate” means several things here. For Rose Gottemoeller—as with any head of a delegation—nearly everything required some form of negotiation.

At times I found myself thinking: one-on-one sessions with her hawkish Russian counterpart (Anatoly Antonov, who is currently the Russian Ambassador to the United States) must have been the most pleasant part of the whole ordeal. In that setting, at least you know where the other side stands. There is also mutual empathy between the top negotiators regarding bureaucratic turf wars and demands from on high—such as “get this done by X date.”

Previous nuclear agreements came about during a time of relative political consensus—when President Barack Obama sent Gottemoeller to Capital Hill to generate support for New START after he signed it… show more.

I recommend this book because, to me, the book is like a pair of glasses that I put on whenever I want to see the world a little more clearly.

For others, it has something to offer to anyone who is looking to learn to analytically study conflict, war, and peace. Don’t know “enough” economics to study these topics analytically? No problem. Read Part II of the book. Don’t know “enough” about conflict to apply your knowledge of economics to those topics? Part III of the book has you covered.

Enough of conflict, can we learn more about peace, you say? The last part of the book is for you. Together, the book is as an indispensable resource for professors, students, policymakers, and an educated general audience, alike.

I got this book for the incisive presentation and critique of the nuclear revolution thesis. I stayed for the original theory and detailed history. The chapters on the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations provided me with a new understanding of that era. For the nuclear revolution, the superpower behavior of the late Cold War was either irrational or driven by domestic pathologies. Green shows that there was a cold strategic logic and domestic political awareness behind U.S. policy. American leaders tailored arms control in ways that allowed them to continue competing and indeed gain an advantage against the Soviet Union.

Red Alert is a 1958 novel by a former RAF pilot called Peter George about nuclear war and was the inspiration for Stanley Kubrick in the concept of his 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. George’s book is a great read and pretty grim but it is not comedic in any way. After playing around with storyboards for a film based on the book, Kubrick realised the only way to deal with the nuclear mindset was through satire. Inspired by Peter George Kubrick somehow got to the nub of the lunacy of the nuclear gamble.

This was three decades before I was able – using then declassified documents and interviews with the generals and policymakers only then just prepared to speak about Mutual Assured Destruction and the Doomsday machine for my documentaries and book in the mid-1990s. They revealed Kubrick,… show more.

By the time I read this book, the Cold War was over, and fears about accidental nuclear war had faded, if not quite totally disappeared. Nevertheless, this one brought me back to my childhood, when movies like War Games and The Day After raised the specter of nuclear holocaust.

It is in the same genre: a technical glitch mistakenly sets in motion America’s nuclear defenses, which could lead to global nuclear war. I was not prepared for the ending (no spoiler!), but it was an effective way to show the dangers of using technology to control America’s nuclear arsenal. 

I adore the political attitude of this famous leading researcher in quantum theory.

Of course, he knows better than the general public how severe a global nuclear conflict will endanger the survival of the human species. And of course, he had to endure a broad wave of criticism from colleagues who rather shied away when asked to warn of a new escalating armament race. "This is not our business," was their recommendation.

But Carlo Rovelli always was after truth and wrote a book that fascinates me. His books pave the way not only to understand space and time in a new way, but also to combine the clear argument of natural science with humanist goals. With them, an epistemological break is on its way.

If Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth examined the scientific, ecological, and social impacts of nuclear war, Robert Scheer’s With Enough Shovels is a direct inquiry into the Reagan Administration about their initial thoughts on the subject. Those thoughts, frankly, are frightening. As the title implicates, then-Deputy Under Secretary of Defense T.J. Jones literally suggested that surviving thermonuclear war was easy: “Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top…it’s the dirt that does it…if there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.” Comments by Reagan, Vice President Bush, Defense Secretary Weinberger, and an increasing contingent of “Neo-Conservatives” writing in journals such as Commentary echoed these sentiments. In part, Scheer’s book began a long process of the Reagan Administration scaling back their bravado and recognizing the real dangers of the atomic age.