Abstract

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and SSP alumni Fred Kaplan discusses his book, which takes us into the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “Tank,” and the vast chambers of Strategic Command in Omaha to reveal the untold stories—based on exclusive interviews and previously classified documents—of how American presidents and generals have thought about, threatened, broached, and, in some cases, barely avoided nuclear war, from the dawn of the atomic age until now.

Bio

Fred Kaplan is the national security columnist for Slate and the author of six books—The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), 1959: The Year Everything Changed, Daydream Believers, and The Wizards of Armageddon. A former fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations and the New America Foundation, he is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Boston Globe, and he has a PhD from MIT’s political science department.