Lynn Eden's book offers hot lessons from Cold War

Lynn Eden's award-winning book, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge and Nuclear Weapons Devastation, focuses on the past but it offers broader lessons for the ongoing war on terror. The book asks how and why, for more than half a century, the U.S. government failed to predict fire damage as it drew up plans to fight a strategic nuclear war, even though a nuclear firestorm "would extend two to five times farther than blast damage," Eden wrote in the book. As a result, the U.S. government underestimated the real damage that would be caused by nuclear weapons and built far more warheads than it needed for war-planning purposes.