Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable Harnessing Doom from the Cold War to the Age of Terror

by Stevenson, Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9780670019014
• ISBN10: 0670019011
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-08-14
• Publisher: Viking Adult

Summary

"September 11 was a product of bad intelligence and wrongheaded expectations about al-Qaeda's motivations, intentions, resourcefulness, and capabilities. But it also sprang from a failure of the kind of predictive strategic deliberation that had kept the world from becoming atomic rubble in the fifties and sixties. What was it about the strategic thinking of the Cold War era that we got right?" "The short answer is that deterrence had worked: the prospect of nuclear devastation made its avoidance the undisputed top priority for both Washington and Moscow. At the same time, the rank unacceptability of Soviet communism to Americans and American democratic capitalism to Soviets made each side view the other as the consuming foe that dwarfed all others. In Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable, strategic analyst Jonathan Stevenson illuminates the genius of nuclear deterrence and mutual assured destruction (MAD), as well as the blind spots that limited the great Cold War civilian strategists' intellectual fertility and flexibility." "Stevenson traces the recent evolution of constructive apocalyptic thinking from its zenith in the early nuclear era, when giants like Albert Wohlstetter, Thomas C. Schelling, and Herman Kahn rewrote military strategy to accommodate the hydrogen bomb. He shows that in one of those ironies of history, it was the very successes of the Cold War that spawned many of the intellectual habits that keep our focus insular and our context narrowly national. While we didn't blow each other up, there was plenty that the Cold War strategists got wrong (Vietnam, for instance) or failed to anticipate - in particular, the emergence of Islamist terrorists as a major threat to the United States and its partners."--BOOK JACKET.

Author Biography

Jonathan Stevenson is a professor of strategic studies at the Naval War College. He spent most of the 1990s in sub-Saharan Africa and Northern Ireland, and his previous books include -ôWe Wrecked the Place-ö: Contemplating an End to the Northern Irish Troubles and Losing Mogadishu. He has published articles in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The National Interest, as well as in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic.

Table of Contents

Harnessing Doom	p. 1
American Ways of Thinking	p. 34
Sidelining the Unthinkable	p. 93
Intellectual Dislocations of the Cold War	p. 145
The Halting Leap Forward	p. 193
Selective Nostalgia	p. 224
Acknowledgments	p. 267
Notes	p. 269
Index	p. 289
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