Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Center for International Security and Cooperation Stanford University


CISAC News



November 3, 2004 - News

Lynn Eden's book offers hot lessons from Cold War

By Lisa Trei

Lynn Eden's award-winning book, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge and Nuclear Weapons Devastation, focuses on the past but it offers broader lessons for the ongoing war on terror. The book asks how and why, for more than half a century, the U.S. government failed to predict fire damage as it drew up plans to fight a strategic nuclear war, even though a nuclear firestorm "would extend two to five times farther than blast damage," Eden wrote in the book. As a result, the U.S. government underestimated the real damage that would be caused by nuclear weapons and built far more warheads than it needed for war-planning purposes.


Cover

Whole World on Fire


Lynn Eden
Ithaca: Cornell University Press (2004)

Clothcover (978-0-8014-3578-2) - $59.95

Paperback (978-0-8014-7289-3) - $24.95







    Topics: Organizations