The book traces out the empirical implications of a country's policy that puts an arbitrarily high weight on the lives of one's own citizens. The punishment inflicted on the adversary is rather discontinuous. The consequences to the adversary from miscalculating the threshold at which the discontinuity occurs are disastrous.
The book engages with neither theoretical nor empirical implications of the premise that one is dealing with an adversary who values death more than life. The book does articulate this premise, though.
Can it be immoral to do the morally right thing? Perhaps it can be, if the moral act is so traumatic that it will impair one's ability to act morally in future. Is it immoral to refrain from doing the morally right thing in order to preserve the ability to act morally in future? The book rightly refrains from exploiting a human tragedy as fodder for philosophy porn. The book's focus is the recent history of the ongoing conflict.
