Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable
Subtitle: Harnessing Doom from the Cold War to the Age of Terror
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: August 14, 2008
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780670019014
Subjects: Higher; Political Freedom & Security - Terrorism; Political Science / Political Freedom & Security / Terrorism; Political Science; Education / Teaching; Cold War; Deterrence (Strategy); Government policy; History; Nuclear weapons; United States; Politics/International Relations
Description: "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 thinking that kept the world from becoming atomic rubble in the fifties and sixties. In Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable, strategic analyst Jonathan Stevenson illuminates both the genius of nuclear deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), plus the blind spots that limited the great Cold War civilian strategists' intellectual fertility and flexibility. Once the Soviet Union collapsed and the existential threat of nuclear holocaust abated, the American strategic community--from intelligence officers to policymakers to think tanks--lost the capacity to forecast and prepare for impending new threats to U.S. and global security. If we are to extricate America from its current strategic predicament, we must regenerate for a new age the pragmatic creativity that once distinguished its strategic brain trust."--Publisher's description.