Thomas Allen's War Games Professional Wargaming 1945-1985

In closely guarded rooms in the Pentagon, in think-tanks and colleges throughout the USA and Europe and deep in the heart of the Kremlin, games are being played. Games with stakes like no other - the fate of the world. Super-sophisticated computers are used to rehearse the wars of the future from small-scale Middle Eastern conflicts to total Armageddon. The results of the WAR GAMES, secret until now, are startling - and alarming. Human players will not step over the nuclear threshold-so the Pentagon has devised games in which computers are the only players In the most realistic war games, NATO always loses to the Soviet bloc. The US Navy never allows its aircraft carriers to he sunk in any game or exercise. WAR GAMES draws on never-before-published secret material to take us into the closed world of those who play at destruction, showing how the games have developed and how they are played.