Fred Kaplan

The surprise box-office success of Oppenheimer has revived popular interest in nuclear weapons and nuclear war. National-security columnist Fred Kaplan—author of The Wizards of Armageddon and The Bomb, two of the most highly acclaimed histories of the subject—will trace the story of what happened after Oppenheimer. How did it happen that the United States and the Soviet Union would each build tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, most of them hydrogen bombs, along with the missiles and bombers to deliver them on targets halfway around the world? And who were the scientists—in this case, mainly economists, political scientists, and a few physicists working at think tanks like the RAND Corporation who would have outsize influence in policy making to the present day—who came up with the ideas on how to deter nuclear war and how to fight, and possibly win, a nuclear war if it cannot be deterred.

With the U.S. engulfed in a perpetual election cycle and nerve-rattling partisan clashes, Fred Kaplan asks what impact any particular President has on the rise and fall of American power — and what roller-coaster rides lie ahead. Come along with Fred Kaplan as he takes a deep dive into Washington’s relations with the rest of the world — with allies, adversaries, and fence-straddlers, in the various regions, the hotspots, and the ominous rumblings in areas that once were calm — and to what degree it matters that a Republican or a Democrat sits in the Oval Office.

For nearly 30 years after the Reagan-Gorbachev summits, few among us thought, much less worried, about nuclear war. Now the fear is back, but it’s taken the form of vaguely paralytic anxiety because, in the wake of the long reprieve from the Bomb’s shadow, few know how to grasp its dimensions; they’ve forgotten, if they ever knew. Fred Kaplan traces the real, little-known history of how the Bomb came to dominate our lives. He connects the dots between the generals who tried to make the Bomb an ordinary weapon, the presidents who faced crises and thought deeply about using those weapons, and the political maneuverings—with other nations and within the national-security bureaucracies — that have brought us to the brink of nuclear war or kept it at bay. He also addresses why, despite the ethical concerns and humanitarian consequences of the use of even a single nuclear weapon, the threat of nuclear war will not go away. Relevant to the present moment, he discusses the events in the Ukraine war, which have led Vladimir Putin to threaten the use of nuclear weapons in a scenario more plausible than any since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

As the great novelist William Faulkner once said, "The past isn’t dead; it’s not even past." History courses through the streams of our daily life, in all its realms. The events of today and tomorrow wouldn’t be what they are, if some shockwave of yesterday had gone a different path. Yet many journalists, pundits, and politicians misread the past, or draw false parallels with the present, and, as a result, propose wrongheaded policies that often aggravate, rather than solve, our problems. Fred Kaplan, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and acclaimed historian, lays out some rules for how (and how not) to apply the lessons of history to current crises. The architects of the Vietnam War thought they were preventing another Munich (they’d grown up absorbing the wrong lessons of World War II). Many analysts today view our tensions with Russia and China as a second Cold War (they’d grown up during the first Cold War and don’t see — maybe because they don’t know any earlier history — that today’s disputes aren’t remotely like the global rivalry of the mid-to-late 20th century). It’s not merely that they’re wrong about the past; it’s that their misreading of the past can propel us all to a tragic future.

Much has been said about how artificial intelligence will change the way we live, but little about how it will transform the way we fight. The Pentagon is starting to integrate A.I. into the nation’s war plans. Combined with cyber technologies, it will turn warfare into something new. Imagine the disruptions of cyberattacks carried out at light speed, recognizing and responding instantaneously to enemy counterattacks, without human intervention or control, like a game of chess where pieces on the board shift positions or switch identities, and the board itself changes shape and color. Fred Kaplan, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the seminal book on cyber war, Dark Territory, guides us through this new labyrinth. Cyber security, in war or civilian life, is a big enough challenge: vulnerabilities are inherent to Internet technology; the advantage goes to the attacker. Cyber + A.I. intensifies the problem: weapons are autonomous; the line between offense and defense blurs; battle-plans run on programs that the machines devise and adjust. The technology is outpacing strategy. But there is still a chance to haul it back to human control. Kaplan examines that opportunity too.