Upon assuming the presidency in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower came to be seen by many as a doddering lightweight. Yet behind the bland smile and apparent simplemindedness was a brilliant, intellectual tactician. As Evan Thomas reveals in his provocative examination of Ike's White House years, Eisenhower was a master of calculated duplicity. As with his bridge and poker games he was eventually forced to stop playing after leaving too many fellow army officers...

"Every generation, a journalist has looked deep into the heart of the nuclear military establishment: the technologies, the safeguards, the plans, and the risks. These projects are vital to how we understand the world we really live in: where one nuclear missile begets one in return; where the choreography of the world's end requires massive decisions made on seconds-notice, with information that is only as good as the intelligence we have. Annie...

Nuclear weapons are, today, as important as they were during the Cold War. In fact, some experts say we could be as close to a nuclear catastrophe now as we were at the height of that conflict. Yet conversations about nuclear bombs generally happen in past tense. In Countdown, science journalist Sarah Scoles uncovers a different atomic reality: the unclear age's present. Drawing from years of on-the-ground reporting at the nation's nuclear weapons...

The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story and an ultimately hopeful--and powerfully important--book about not just our country, but the future of the world.