Literary Awards

Dr. Sean M. Maloney is a Professor of History at Royal Military College of Canada and served as the Historical Advisor to the Chief of the Land Staff during the war in Afghanistan. He previously served as the historian for 4 Canadian Mechanized Brigade, the Canadian Army’s primary Cold War NATO commitment after the re-unification of Germany and at the start of Canada’s long involvement in the Balkans. He completed his PhD in 1998. From 2003 Dr. Maloney focused nearly exclusively on the war against Al Qaeda and its allies. He traveled regularly to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2014 to observe and record coalition operations in that country and was the first Canadian military historian to go into combat since the Second World War. He has authored 19 books. After returning to Royal Military College, Dr. Maloney has re-focused back on the Cold War, releasing Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove: The Secret History of Nuclear War Films in 2020 and, in 2021, Emergency War Plan: The American Doomsday Machine, 1945-1960, a reconstruction and analysis of nuclear war plans in the 1950s.

Sean Maloney, Emergency War Plan: The American Doomsday Machine, 1945-1960. Lincoln, Neb: Potomac, 2021.

Emergency War Plan examines the theory and practice of American nuclear deterrence and its evolution during the Cold War. Previous examinations of nuclear strategy during this time have, for the most part, categorized American efforts as “massive retaliation” and “mutually assured destruction,” blunt instruments to be casually dismissed in favor of more flexible approaches or summed up in inflammatory and judgmental terms like “MAD.” These descriptors evolved into slogans, and any nuanced discussion of the efficacy of the actual strategies withered due to a variety of political and social factors.

Drawing on newly released weapons effects information along with new information about Soviet capabilities as well as risky and covert espionage missions, Emergency War Plan provides a completely new examination of American nuclear deterrence strategy during the first fifteen years of the Cold War, the first such study since the 1980s. Ultimately what emerges is a picture of a gargantuan and potentially devastating enterprise that was understood at the time by the public in only the vaguest terms but that was not as out of control as has been alleged and was more nuanced than previously understood.

Sean Maloney has written an extremely detailed, prodigiously researched with primary sources, and highly readable account of the US nuclear war plans of the 1950s.  He emphasizes the crucial nature of targeting schemes, first-rate and prolific intelligence gathering systems and analysis, and global command and control of nuclear forces.  These forces were not inflexible as previously described, but infinitely pliable and nuanced.  Indeed, he rejects the notion of massive retaliation; instead, he offers the term “massive deterrence” to describe the effect of these forces, their demonstrated ability to deliver their weapons on target, and the iron will of American leaders to respond to a Soviet or Chinese attack if necessary.  Deterrence worked.  This is a definitive work on a complicated subject.