Emergency War Plan

Sean M. Maloney is a professor of history at the Royal Military College of Canada and served as the Canadian Army’s historian for the war in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2014. He is the author of several books, including Learning to Love the Bomb: Canada’s Nuclear Weapons during the Cold War (Potomac Books, 2007) and Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove: The Secret History of Nuclear War Films (Potomac Books, 2020).

"Emergency War Plan is an important and much-needed book. . . . The author has done yeoman service with the book, and it deserves a place on the scholar's shelf next to Richard Rhodes's outstanding works on the development of nuclear weapons."—John M. Curatola, Journal of Military History "Maloney's narrative on the emergence and refinement of the Emergency War Plan, the book's core subject, is deeply researched, clearly presented, and compelling."—Ingo Trauschweizer, International Journal of Military History and Historiography“This is an outstanding book. Sean Maloney has written an extremely detailed, prodigiously researched, and highly readable account of the U.S. nuclear war plans of the 1950s. . . . [Maloney] offers the term ‘massive deterrence’ to describe the effect of these [nuclear] forces, their demonstrated ability to deliver their weapons on target, and the iron will of American leaders to respond to a Soviet or Chinese attack if necessary. Deterrence worked. This is a definitive work on a complicated and arcane subject.”—Phillip S. Meilinger, former dean of the School of Advanced Airpower Studies at Air University “[This] is the Rosetta Stone compendium and most comprehensive body of work I have ever read on the development of the United States’ nuclear war plan. In exacting detail this book unravels the mystery behind the planning and operations of America’s nascent nuclear capability during the early years of the Cold War.”—Lt. Gen. Jack Weinstein, USAF (Ret.), former commander of the Twentieth Air Force and former deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration at the Pentagon “It might seem quaint today, but that distant ‘air atomic age’ of Truman and Eisenhower’s day planted and sprouted the seeds of the nuclear reign of terror. Sean Maloney renders an exhaustive account of how atomic penury morphed into nuclear plenty, and how war plans—including British offensive and Soviet defensive ones—changed in response. Along the way, Emergency War Plan presents a fresh picture of bombs, bombers, and groups matched to prospective targets, in a much more sophisticated fashion than in our received history of ‘massive retaliation.’ This book helps us understand Cold War history in a new way.”—John Prados, author of The Soviet Estimate