A solid, well-researched book, with clear prose that helps propel the narrative through the murkier aspects of the motives and reasonings of Cold War strategic decision making.
Army History This book is an indispensable source for studying the international diplomacy of the Vietnam War. Its richness ensures that readers will emerge from its pages with differing judgments and assessments of ... Read moreNixon's coercive diplomacy.
Journal of American History William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball deserve praise for their discerning and cogent reconstruction of the motives and actions of the Nixon Administration to its first year. Students interested in the Vietnam War or the Cold War more generally will learn a great deal from Nixon's Nuclear Specter.
Michigan War Studies Review Nixon's Nuclear Specter is a detailed and careful account of Nixon's and Kissinger's fruitless efforts during 1969 to find an honorable way out of Vietnam. As events that year unfolded, these authors demonstrate, honor had little to do with it.
New York Review of Books What the authors reveal is the intense, behind-the-scenes plotting and planning that Nixon and Kissinger carried on in 1969 as they desperately tried to find a way to move the Vietnam War talks with Hanoi to fruition. VVA Veteran An important contribution to the [Cold War] literature.
Choice Well written and thoroughly researched, Nixon's Nuclear Specter is a rich study of scholars of the era, and essential for those interested in Vietnam, the Nixon era, and the mindset of our 37th president. With the release of additional Nixon White House records and tapes we can only hope that the authors continue writing, jointly, or separately, for many more years.
H-Net Reviews There will be no better book-length case study on coercive nuclear diplomacy than the one just written by William burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball.
Arms Control Today Finally, a well-researched and well-written account of our leaders' dangerous nuclear brinksmanship across the high years of the Cold War. There's much here that's new and much that's troubling
for today as well as yesterday.
Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb I didn't know any of this as I was copying the top secret Pentagon Papers that fall, but if I had I would have given the Papers to the newspapers right away
rather than two years later, after waiting in vain for Congress to act on them
in desperate hopes of heading off massive escalation and possible nuclear war. A gripping and essential read!
Daniel Ellsberg, author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers Show Less