The reader from Las Vegas is right - this book can only be read today as a piece of historical humor. It was written during the Cold War by an extremely conservative republican who thought that Robert MacNamera & JFK were sending the good ol' U.S. of A. to hell in a handbasket by reducing our nuclear tonage as a show of good-will to the Soviets. The U.S. was able to reduce tonage because they formed new nuclear weapons that weighed much less, but the author keeps insisting that losing the "tonage battle" was going to "dig our graves" and by now we should be a Soviet colony. Well, things happened exactly the opposite of what the author claimed they would, so she ends up looking like a paranoid right-wing nut case. The cold war is over - America won. The author was wrong. The only reason this book is still available is a sign of just how big a wig-case the author was - she included something in her will that would make this book continue to be available long after she was dead. If you can't sleep one night & need a good laugh, pick this puppy up!

This book is a very funny display of republican ignorance and stupidity. It's a "Red Scare" work, blabbering on about, how by now, the United States should either be enslaved by Russia or completely destroyed. The idiots writing the book are dead wrong about virtually everything they say. In fact, the exact opposite of virtually every prediction has come true! Read this book to see how stupid republicans really are and how their wild, half-baked thought process is an absolute joke. This is an excellent work of humor.

...your life depended on our ability to stop one intercontinental ballistic missile launched at us, or on our competitors keeping their word as set down in arms control treaties. This, in a nutshell, is the thesis of this book. Don't let the 1964 publication date fool you; the examples and data may be old, but the argument is as compelling and relevant today as when it was written. That argument is: our security must be grounded in our own ability to defend ourselves, not in treaties with nations whose precieved national interest may be at variance with the scraps of paper that they signed. This should be a no-brainer, but today's heated debate over missile defense shows that it is not so. The author lays out the case for our being in danger, and her perscription for meeting that danger, in prose direct as it is vigorous. A very useful promer on strategic issues for readers in an age when people are often deluded into believing that we are at the 'end of history.' -Lloyd A. Conway

Phylis Schlafly, associated with the extremist xenophobic John Birch Society, puts together a paranoid philonuclear diatribe here, that completely ignored the situation in the 1960s.

The idea that a ballistic missile defense is somehow useful is still sold as snake-oil by right-wing crackpots and defense contractors, but, back then, as now, it simply doesn't fly.

The recent "remarkable advances" in "missle defense" were only made by incorporating GPS transmitters into "targets!" Engineers- speaking honestly, without a financial stake in the outcome- have known this and spoken about this for decades. It's a big welfare program, plain and simple.

The idea of a "winnable" nuclear war is hideously immoral, and the Dr. Strangeloves and their consorts, such as Schlafly should be consigned to the ash-heap of history PRONTO.

I read the review written by John M.K. with great amusement, as usual, leftists cannot argue facts so they attack the writer. Name calling and twisted logic is all they offer.

The book is well written.

Whatever impression this book made at the time (1968), it is an astonishing read today. Written by Eagle Forum President and founder Phyllis Schlaffly and Admiral Chester Ward, the thesis of the book is that key members of the Johnson Administration, in particular Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, had actively sought to weaken and impair the defenses of the United States, motivated by a belief that the cause of freedom was doomed, that the Soviet Union would surely win the Cold War, and that preparing for the eventual inevitable surrender was the best means to survival.

Regardless of the validity of that position (or of the specific choice of motives), the information used to make the case bears examination. Schlaffly and Ward walk the reader through a panorama of Johnson Administration defense and foreign policy positions, compellingly outlining a defensive disaster. The astute reader will recall without reminder that in 1960, the United States possessed overwhelming military superiority over its Communist opponents, and that by 1968 -- just eight years, or two presidential terms, later -- that had turned into mere parity and, in some cases, inferiority. If nothing else, this caused extreme, needless problems for American diplomacy over the following two decades; and of course, it had the potential to cause far, far worse.

What Schlaffly and Ward show is that the cause of the change was not so much the Soviet build-up as McNamara's dismantling of America's existing force, including (but by no means limited to) the entirety of our B-47 fleet, much of our B-52 fleet, our entire fleet of supersonic (and brand new) B-58s, and our entire surface-to-air missile defense system in North America (a system, by the way, which centered on the Nike-Hercules missile, itself well capable of rudimentary ballistic missile defense). Moreover, in the face of the aforementioned radical Soviet build-up, McNamara cancelled all strategic submarine production, the B-70 program, and all modern ICBM development; and generally did everything in his power to decrease American power beneath that of its deadly enemy.

Combined with McNamara's non-strategy in Vietnam, one could almost believe the "Betrayers" thesis.

Perhaps most striking about this book, though, is not its amazing history but its astonishing currency. The Left's arguments against missile defense in particular have not changed in the slightest particular over the past three decades, despite revolutionary advances in technology and the complete upending of the "old world order". Pitifully enough, the arguments were as false then as now: the Nike-Hercules and Nike-X systems -- and even the pitiful Safeguard, deployed and then scrapped by Gerald Ford in 1975 -- were fine systems technologically; and a system of "defense" based on holding millions of people hostage to nuclear terror (otherwise known as "Mutual Assured Destruction") remains hideously immoral.

In any case, The Betrayers is one of the more interesting artifacts of the Cold War, and well worth picking up. No serious student of the period, or of current defense policy for that matter, should be without it.