Top ten books on nuclear weapons & arms control

Michael Krepon is co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, Diplomat Scholar at the University of Virginia, and the author or editor of many books, including Cooperative Threat Reduction, Missile Defense, and the Nuclear Future, Space Assurance or Space Dominance? The Case Against Weaponizing Space, Nuclear Risk Reduction in South Asia, and Escalation Control and the Nuclear Option in South Asia.

His latest book is Better Safe than Sorry, The Ironies of Living with the Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2009).

Krepon named his top ten books on nuclear weapons and arms control for Foreign Policy. One book on his list:

Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (1959).

Brodie moved to the RAND Corporation, where he wrote this work seeking to counter the prevailing winds of nuclear policy on which Kissinger had set sail. Brodie's background as a naval historian provided an excellent vantage point to assess nuclear matters. Brodie resisted enthusiasms on almost every page. This book continues to offer rewards. For example, he warned against preventive war which required "an extraordinary, indeed almost boundless, degree of conviction and resolution on the part of the President."

Read about another book on Krepon's list.

Also see the Page 99 Test: Better Safe Than Sorry: The Ironies of Living with the Bomb by Michael Krepon.

--Marshal Zeringue