From Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills comes this groundbreaking examination of how the atomic bomb profoundly altered the nature of American democracy, and why we have been in a state of war alert ever since.--Book jacket.

Introduction: War in peace -- The making of bomb power -- Fatal miracle -- Atomic politics -- The care and keeping of the bomb -- The national security state -- Beginnings (1945-1946) -- Annus mirabilis (1947) -- Completing the apparatus -- Presidential wars -- Korea -- Permanent emergency -- Information power -- Secrecy as embarrassment cover -- Secrecy as Congress deceiver -- Secrecy as policy distorter -- Secrecy as crime concealer -- Executive usurpations -- "War power" -- Challenging secrecy -- Unitary executive -- American monarch.