Overkill: Causes and Consequences

Seymour Melman’s book is a bit disconcerting. It is repetitious, at times it screams at the reader, and it is seriously wanting in sustained analysis. What Melman needed most was a good editor.

The recurrent theme is that American emphasis on overkill has resulted in a redundant stockpile of nuclear weapons and a gross misallocation of our resources away from the public and private sectors of the economy. This morbid obsession with overkill has, in Melman’s view, distorted our values, increased the influence of the military-industrial complex, worsened the relative productivity position of the U.S. in the world economy, increased the degree of alienation in our society, disoriented the young by facing them with a ̶...