War, Peace, and International Relations. An Introduction to Strategic History

this challenge was America’s ‘strategic moment’. In 1945, the United States, with help from its allies of course, had triumphed ...

history in its most literal sense. Some commentators, scholars and policy-makers, in the West at least, came to believe that the ...

There were several reasons why Nazi Germany made little progress towards the development of an atomic bomb, notwithstanding the ...

matter (Powers, 1993; Cornwell, 2004: 406–10). The balance of scholarship today favours the view that Heisenberg, for all his un ...

The hydrogen fusion bomb changed the strategic context radically. From atomic weapons in the tens of kilotons, the Cold War prot ...

states should be improbable. The belligerent facing such defeat would be strongly motivated to resort to its nuclear arms rather ...

212 War, peace and international relations Table 15.1Nuclear stockpiles, 1945–89 Year USA USSR UK France China Total 1945 6 6 19 ...

Nearly everyone in the Western Alliance agreed on deterrence as the master concept for the new weapons, but there was scant agre ...

to agree on a common definition of ‘strategic stability’. That rather telling point suggests that the Soviet Union was not fully ...

its previous nuclear superiority? The condition of strategic parity seemingly was conceded by Washington on 26 May 1972 with the ...

conventional forces capable of defending Europe against the Red Army (Etzold and Gaddis, 1978: 433–4). The burden of nuclear cre ...

Both the United States and the Soviet Union succeeded in designing and implementing systems for the command and control of nucle ...

Questions Is the concept of ‘nuclear strategy’ a contradiction in terms? What was the strategic value of nuclear weapons in the ...

16 War and peace after the Cold War An interwar decade Introduction: the interwar thesis It is useful to think of the 1990s as a ...

Map 16.1 Europe after the Cold War ...

The interwar issue is of high importance. Is the master strategic narrative of the 1990s and 2000s primarily to be regarded: (1) ...

transition from Cold War to a more cooperative international political context. But how should that be attempted? The decade ope ...

initially on the very day that Iraq invaded Kuwait. But he was not a man much enthralled by what he referred to dismissively as ...

why prudent politicians in Washington were disinclined to rush to the drawing board – or, increasingly, to the computer – for th ...

‘New wars’ and ‘old wars’: a bloody decade Active great power rivalry may have taken a vacation in the post-Cold War decade and ...