DETERRING ARMAGEDDON
From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War
by Tom Ramos
Naval Institute Press, 2022,
288 pages, $39.95.
The nearly half-century-long Cold War between the U.S.-led West and the Soviet Union (1946-1991) produced a plethora of “hot spots,” flashpoints where the Cold War could turn “hot” overnight. But none of these potential Armageddon-provoking locations was more important nor more critical to solidifying Western resolve than was Berlin (Germany’s once and future capital city). Cut off from the West by its location 115 miles inside Soviet-controlled Communist East Germany (officially, the DDR, ) the fourpower administered (USSR, U.S., U.K. and France) city was an isolated island of economically-fueled freedom trapped within the bleak, dismal, depressing landscape of the egregiously misnamed “Communist workers’ paradise.” The visible success of West Berlin, a vibrant symbol of the West’s economic dominance over the wheezing and puffing, inefficient
