A is for ABM, Aircraft Carriers, Air Defence System, AK-47, ANZUS, Armour, Arms Race, Artillery, Assured Destruction, and sixty other items in this new reference book. Edward Luttwak, author of the highly successful Coup d'État, has compiled a handbook of essential data for the intelligent newspaper reader. There are three categories of entry: hardware, giving critical specifications of the weapons in use, or threatened use, in the modern arsenal: organization, explaining the treaties and pacts of the post-war world; and concepts, analysing the political and ideological jargon, and the meaning of such terms as 'threshold', 'subversion', 'massive retaliation' and 'first strike'. A guide through mid-twentieth-century realities, and a rigorously exact catalogue of modern firepower, Luttwak's Dictionary of Modern War provides an immense aid to the participation of the individual in the ways of the military and of government.