Matthew Jones is Professor of American Foreign Relations at the University of Nottingham. His previous publications include Britain, the United States, and the Mediterranean War, 1942-44 (1996) and Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961-1965 (Cambridge, 2002).

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. In the shadow of Hiroshima: the United States and Asia in the aftermath of Japanese defeat; 2. The Korean War, the atomic bomb, and Asian-American estrangement; 3. Securing the East Asian frontier: stalemate in Korea and the Japanese peace treaty; 4. A greater sanction: the defence of South East Asia, the advent of the Eisenhower administration and the end of the Korean War; 5. 'Atomic madness': massive retaliation and the Bravo test; 6. The aftermath of Bravo, the Indochina crisis, and the emergence of SEATO; 7. 'Asia for the Asians': the first Offshore Islands crisis and the Bandung Conference; 8. A nuclear strategy for SEATO and the problem of limited war in the Far East; 9. Massive retaliation at bay: US-Japanese relations, nuclear deployment, and the limited war debate; 10. The second Offshore Islands crisis and the advent of flexible response; 11. The Chinese bomb, American nuclear strategy in Asia, and the escalation of the Vietnam War; Conclusion; Bibliography.

Review of the hardback: 'The great strength of this empirically rich study lies in the important interconnections that it traces between two topics that scholars typically treat in isolation: race and nuclear strategy. … Matthew Jones has provided us with one of the most important books on U.S. policy toward early Cold War Asia in recent years.' Robert J. McMahon, Journal of Cold War Studies