Strange Love: America and the Bomb

Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State
by Gary Wills
Penguin Press, 288 pp, $27.95

WE BELIEVE funny things about nuclear weapons. We capitalize “the Bomb” in the same way that we capitalize “God.” We call it the Bomb because, presumably, ours is a monotheistic religion. We associate nuclear weapons with God-like power, with the end of the world and the apocalypse. There was, at first, good reason for this mystification. The first men who saw the Bomb we... More