Fred Kaplan: A Capital Calamity: Escapades in Doomsday Land. (2024)
Fri, Aug 29, 2025./noise/books | LinkKindle. Is this satire or Kaplan's best dream life?
It's the present day (any time you like from about 1950 to 2025) in a Washington D.C. where all the ladies are powerful and foxy. A minor jape threatens to ignite World War 3 and it is up to the flawed decision makers to get it right for all the wrong reasons. We are fortunate that they receive so much competent help from the ladies and our leading man, especially in spite of his business model being to speak out of both sides of his mouth. Apparently it is not yet too late to find something to believe in, especially if you're the man the moment has called forth.
Kaplan knows from his deep, lengthy research that nuclear war cannot be limited; this precludes him from sharing the delusions of Ackerman and Stavridis (and others) about the coming apocalypse. He's less interested in the global view (India does not feature, of course China is America's foe, the Russians are abidingly relevant) but similarly emphasises that personal links dominate the institutional ones. (I expect all three would concur that today's institutions are incapable of meeting our actual historical moment.)
The characters mostly speak with flattened voices, excepting a New England Defence Secretary. The occasional genuinely funny bit is interspersed with some clunky exposition, but we're not here for high literature. The best bit of didacticism comes late in the form of a warning from the Chinese back channel: if the US backs down from a conventional war then the chances of later, worse conflict increase.
Lawrence D. Freedman at Foreign Affairs: it coulda been autofic. Bill Thompson: game theory gone bonkers. Goodreads: expectations not met?
