First published twenty years ago, Lawrence Freedman's Evolution of Nuclear Strategy was immediately acclaimed as a seminal work on the history of attempts to cope militarily and politically with the terrible destructive power of nuclear weapons. This new edition takes the story beyond the end of the cold war, through the Gulf War and new arguments about missile defence and 'rogue states', up to the impact of the events of 11 September 2001. While the removal of the Warsaw Pact from the scene brought to an abrupt end many of the debates that had dominated strategic discourse for the previous four decades, the basic question of whether or not this destructive power could be used for political ends, and how best to stop others trying to do so, remained. In one volume the reader can trace the story of nuclear strategy from its roots in thinking about airpower in the first decades of the Twentieth Century to arguments about how to deal with the possibility of nuclear terrorism in the Twenty-First. There is full coverage of how the west came to rely on nuclear weapons to deter Soviet aggression and the major problems of credibility that soon opened up as the Soviet Union developed its own nuclear capability. The highlights of the ensuing strategic debate are described, and the contributions of the leading figures in these debates are examined. The extent to which the theorising influenced the formation of policy in the major nuclear powers is explored. At all times the wider political context is kept in view, demonstrating the factors which shaped the nuclear legacy with which each new generation must cope.

LAWRENCE FREEDMAN is Professor of War Studies and Head of the School of Social Science and Public Policy at King's College, London. He is the author of many books and articles, including The Gulf Conflict (with Efraim Karsh) and Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam. In 1997 he was appointed Official Historian of the Falklands Campaign.