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"National Security Council (U.S.).-Net Evaluation Subcommittee-History"
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The End of Victory
The End of Victory recounts
the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most
secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net
Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US
leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen
if they failed in a nuclear war-how many Americans would die and
how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents
Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of
the worst failure of American strategy-a maximum-effort surprise
Soviet nuclear assault on the United States.
Edward Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information
for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR
and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee
delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in
Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During
these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the
NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of
conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives.
Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the
probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks
of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End
of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks-and ones
involving military force run grave ones-though they can rarely be
known with precision.
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