After Hiroshima

In After Hiroshima Matthew Jones combines a history of the Cold War in Asia with an examination of the dual themes of race and nuclear weapons in U.S. foreign policy. The result is an ambitious work that offers a fresh take on such well-covered subjects as the Korean War, the China-Taiwan offshore island crisis, and the origins of American involvement in Vietnam. Jones employs the bomb as “a prism through which to observe the development of American views on their troubled relations with the peoples and states of the region” (p. 2). Though it spans the end of World War II through the first two years of Lyndon B. Johnson's administration, After Hiroshima provides a detailed examination of Dwight D. Eisenhower's tortured attempts to find some practical diplomatic or military use for America's expanding nuclear arsenal. Jones's account amounts to a devastating critique of Eisenhower's New Look strategy, which relied heavily on nuclear weapons to project American power and deter the Soviet Union and China without the need to maintain large (and expensive) conventional military forces. Jones concludes that, even more than in Europe, the New Look was simply untenable in Asia. In addition to creating the problem of finding suitable targets for the bomb in places such as Korea, expanding on the precedent of Hiroshima by once again employing nuclear weapons against a “non-white” power such as China “would in fact generate a revulsion against the United States which would prejudice the pursuit of its more general goals in the region” (p. 270

Arms race · China · Economic history · Foreign policy · Great power · Nuclear warfare · Nuclear weapon · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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