The Cold War: A History

The British author of 24 books mostly on military history (The United States and Africa, etc.), Miller has produced a look at the Cold War that is astonishingly light on the broad diplomatic perspective and way too heavy on the technology--in fact, to call this a military history is to misidentify the book in relation to others that explore the larger events shaping the conflict between East and West throughout the postwar period. This account is chock-full of the development of weapon systems, with little discussion of the strategic and political needs that shaped their evolution, and even less of a look at the theaters in which they were deployed. There is nothing in here of Vietnam, Korea, the Cuban missile crisis, Afghanistan or any of the spy incidents between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Instead, we get tallies of how many nuclear weapons tests were carried out by each side, how many battleships, submarines and planes they had and how they were equipped. Only in the first part of the book does the author show his range of knowledge with a thorough and engaging look at the political landscape of the post-WWII world. Given the subject matter, Miller's writing is necessarily dry, a dull enumeration of various types of weapons and war ships (""The first six SSNs all had the traditional long, thin hull and twin propellers of the German Type XXI""). This prodigious accounting of Cold War weaponry will be of interest only to the serious military scholar and technophile. 16 pages b&w photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)