Nuclear Monopoly Av George H. Quester

<p>Throughout the decades of the Cold War, people all around the world lived in fear of thermonuclear war. To assuage that fear theorists of deterrence explained over and over again that both sides had to be able to retaliate with "mutual assured destruction," to keep nuclear weapons from being used. Yet this "basic fact" of nuclear deterrence begs the question: What deterred the United States from a preemptive strike before 1949 when Joseph Stalin''s Soviet Union had not yet acquired nuclear weapons of its own? In <em>Nuclear Monopoly</em> George Quester sets forth the case for preventive war using rudimentary atomic weapons to avoid the possibility of a future war in which both sides would have used hydrogen bombs.</p><p>Quester demonstrates that the notion of mutual assured destruction was rooted in the questionable assumption that assured destruction must be mutual and that the United States "of course" would never consider preventive war. He explores the logic of these assumptions