This survey of U.S. naval aviation and nuclear weapons is at its best when Adm. Miller talks about the travails the active squadrons went through in terms of generating an operational capability, closely followed by some of the doubts the author vents about the misguided (in his view) mystification the nuclear apparartus erected around the weapons themselves. Miller goes so far as to suggest that for a major power nuclear weapons are almost an obsolete capability.

What I don't quite buy is the notion that the effort to create a functional nuclear capacity saved U.S. naval aviation, as any of the other naval air missions were mostly land-based anyway. While an interesting counterfactual, I'm not convinced that Miller has quite enough evidence to make this outcome seem plausible. ( )