
Bureaucrats at the Brink
If we accept the description of war that emerged from the trenches of World War I—“boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror”—then the Cold War, despite appearances, really was a war. It was the most destructive thing the human race had ever contemplated. The Soviet Union had forty-three thousand nuclear warheads, the United States roughly the same. These weapons were many times more powerful than the bombs with which the US leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
And yet the Cold War was boring, too. World War I rhetoric was elegiac, about the lamps going out across Europe. World War II