Joel H. Rosenthal
Campbell Craig has written a fresh and compelling study of American nuclear strategy in the depths of the Cold War. While most studies follow the themes of deterrence, massive retaliation and mutual assured destruction, Craig highlights the often overlooked theme of evasion. This is a wonderful history of ideas, and of the men whose moral and ethical principles provided much needed restraint in a time of confrontation, urgency, and anxiety.
— Joel H. Rosenthal, President, Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs
Paul Fussell
Campbell Craig's Destroying the Village is not just painstakingly researched and intellectuallly acute; it resonates with a subtle, ironic moral understanding which is no less powerful for being quiet and controlled. The reader asks, did we actually live through so preposterous a scene and accept it as our due? The book answers, no matter how unbelievably, we did. This is electric reading. Not to be missed.
— Paul Fussell, author of The Great War and Modern Memory
Richard H. Immerman
Drawing on voluminous and recently released archives, Craig insightfully traces the evolution of Eisenhower's thinking about the unthinkable. The light he sheds on such illustrative episodes of brinksmanship as the Taiwan Straight and Berlin crises is most welcome; the dichotomy he establishes between the views of Eisenhower and Dulles is most revealing. Anyone interested in U.S. nuclear strategy, or what Craig appropriately calls the strategy of nuclear evasion, will find this book both challenging and indispensable.
— Richard H. Immerman, Editor of John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War
Paul Boyer
"Destroying the Village is a wonderful book. Drawing on recently declassified documents, Campbell Craig offers a penetrating analysis of what he argues was Eisenhower's high-risk strategy of making global thermonuclear war unthinkable by eliminating all the intermediate steps that he believed would escalate to the ultimate holocaust once the hostilities began. This beautifully written, and lucidly organized book offers new perspectives on strategic thinking during the Cold War's most dangerous phase, and illuminates our understanding of the often tense relations between Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and powerful figures in the Pentagon. This is a must read for anyone interested in policy debates that, in the last analysis, involved nothing less than the fate of the earth."
— Paul Boyer, author of By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age.
