Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable: Harnessing Doom from the Cold War to the Age of Terror

A top strategic analyst explains what the Cold War can teach us about the War on Terror

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 thinking that kept the world from becoming atomic rubble in the fifties and sixties. In Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable, strategic analyst Jonathan Stevenson illuminates both the genius of nuclear deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), plus the blind spots that limited the great Cold War civilian strategists’ intellectual fertility and flexibility. Once the Soviet Union collapsed and the existential threat of nuclear holocaust abated, the American strategic community— from intelligence officers to policymakers to think tanks—lost the capacity to forecast and prepare for impending new threats to U.S. and global security. Complementing the cold-eyed revelations of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower and Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco, Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable is a probing, urgent exhortation: if we are to extricate America from its current strategic predicament, we must regenerate for a new age the pragmatic creativity that once distinguished its strategic brain trust.