In the summer of 1963, a secret report handed to John F. Kennedy's White House generated colossal anxiety. The "Special National Intelligence Estimate," prepared by the CIA, found that Communist China was close to obtaining nuclear weapons. Yikes! The very idea of Mao Zedong and his band of Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries possessing nukes was enough to prompt the Kennedy squad to consider a pre-emptive military strike to take out China's weapons program. The American public, accustomed to sensationalist (and often blatantly racist) propaganda portraying the Chinese as "the Yellow Peril," might well have cheered such an assault. But the intelligence appraisal...