In Continental Defense in the Eisenhower Era: Nuclear Antiaircraft Arms and the Cold War, Christopher Bright argues that the fundamental decisions about U.S. nuclear antiaircraft weapons were made during Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration (1953–1961). Bright uses a multidimensional approach, tracing the development of nuclear antiaircraft weapons and recounting the related official government actions, U.S. military doctrinal decisions, public policies, and manifestations of these weapons in popular culture. Bright's central emphasis is on the “how and why atomic charges came to be fitted to antiaircraft weapons, who knew about this development, and what they thought about it” (p. 2). He seeks to balance the larger literature devoted to U.S. strategic and tactical nuclear weapons under Eisenhower, arguing that regardless of the administration's decisions and policies about those weapons, nuclear air defense efforts generally remained the same, being “commonsensical necessities” (p. 4).
The book is chronologically and thematically divided. Bright first...