More like 4.5 stars. Really deep dive into our government's preparedness for nuclear war. The thing I had trouble with was keeping all the people straight, some didn't have explanations of their role or why they were in the book. ( )

Super interesting cold war history book that doesn't really focus on the cold war, but rather focuses on the continuity of government planning from ~1950 - 2001. Closely follows presidential changes between administrations, ongoing war efforts, and CoG events and how they shaped the way the govt handles situations. Pretty interesting actually! ( )

While there was VERY interesting information in this book, it was frequently buried under piles of not terribly pertinent details. A member of my book group compared the book to a text book. The level of detail in this book made it a grueling read for me.
So while the information about the U.S.'s doomsday prep is fascinating, this book is definitely not a nonfiction novel. ( )

I read Raven Rock right after Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (which I recommend), which made for some enlightening moments of reading the same events from different perspectives. Eisenhower's predelegation of nuclear weapons authority, for example, comes across quite differently when it's discovered in the field vs. evolved from the president's concerns. Add Eric Schlosser's Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, and we're now far enough from the Cold War to have a set of accessible histories of the era that give more of the picture of just how dangerous it was.

Ellsberg: The plan was to kill everybody in response to any active war with the Soviets.
Schlosser: We came a lot closer to accidental war than we knew, and we also almost nuked ourselves a few times.
Graff: Your plan to escape to the wilderness was futile because the Soviets knew about, and presumably targeted, the secret bunkers you didn't know were in the same hills.
Ellsberg, again: Nuclear war plans were going to kill everyone, anyway.

I've read heavier books and papers about nuclear weapons strategy over the years, but these books have provided the context that was always secret. Let's call it, seeing the challenge with fresh eyes. ( )

This was a really good book. Since the beginning of the Cold War the government has spent billions on the continuation of itself, its institutions and people in the event of a nuclear war. Bunkers have been dug, evacuation schemes devised in what became giant Rube-Goldberg contraptions. As trial runs have happened and natural disasters occurred, one thing is obvious, plans for dealing with a widespread nuclear are not up to task.
Note to publisher: This is a book about government; a glossary of acronyms would have been handy. ( )