Book Review: Limited Strategic (I.e. Nuclear) War Knorr/Read

Knorr, Klaus; Read, Thornton (eds) "Limited Strategic War" Frederick A Praeger NY (1962) Well, this is a chilling book. It contains 8 essays, including one by Schelling (The Strategy of Conflict, (http://elcenia.com/iamapirate/schelling.pdf) also a must-read book) The essay by Burns (Chapter 6) "The Problem of Alliances" sets up an all-too-real China-Australia conflict (China gets most of its coal from Australia). This could make the South China Sea Nine-Dash line into a "bit of a kerfluffle" (to use British understatement). This is a collection of essays on limited nuclear war. In chapter 5, p156 we see: "The effort to distinguish sharply between "conventional" and nuclear weapons is necessarily an effort to impede such reprisals, as in Khrushchev's contention that nuclear war necessarily must be all-out nuclear war. If he can convince us that he really believes this, he effectively deters us from resorting to nuclear reprisals. We might be able to meet this in part by effectively establishing limited nuclear retaliation as official policy before a war occurs. This would have the additional advantage, were it politically feasible, that the strategy would not be initiated during the heat of a losing war, when the newness of the policy and the lack of defined limits might make the coordination of expectations more difficult than if the policy were enunciated in advance. Moreoever, failure to enunciate the policy in advance that any use of nuclear weapons will be opposed -- for example, by double retaliation -- thus making the coordination of expectations more difficult." Note that "establishing limited nuclear retaliation as official policy" JUST occurred. The Pentagon published "Nuclear Operations" https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp3_72.pdf So if you're sitting around thinking that Nukes will never be used, you need to read this book.