"September 11 was a product of bad intelligence and wrongheaded expectations about al-Qaeda's motivations, intentions, resourcefulness, and capabilities. But it also sprang from a failure of the kind of predictive strategic deliberation that had kept the world from becoming atomic rubble in the fifties and sixties. "The short answer is that deterrence had worked: the prospect of nuclear devastation made its avoidance the undisputed top priority for both Washington and Moscow. At the same time, the rank unacceptability of Soviet communism to Americans and American democratic capitalism to Soviets made each side view the other as the consuming foe that dwarfed all others. In Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable, strategic analyst Jonathan Stevenson illuminates the genius of nuclear deterrence and mutual assured destruction (MAD), as well as the blind spots that limited the great Cold War civilian strategists' intellectual fertility and flexibility." "Stevenson traces the recent evolution of constructive apocalyptic thinking from its zenith in the early nuclear era, when giants like Albert Wohlstetter, Thomas C. Schelling, and Herman Kahn rewrote military strategy to accommodate the hydrogen bomb. He shows that in one of those ironies of history, it was the very successes of the Cold War that spawned many of the intellectual habits that keep our focus insular and our context narrowly national.