Abstract

The Second World War put an end to America's historical isolationism. Three American thinkers--Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz--developed a modern strategic framework that sought to introduce Americans to the harsher realities of international politics. Yet even as the United States began to embrace this new Realism, atomic weaponry threatened to make it absurd. This engrossing story of how the three chief architects of a powerful ideology struggled with the implications of their own creation offers crucial context for contemporary debates about the resort to war and weapons of mass destruction.