By the Bomb's Early Noir

Reviewed by: Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965 Maurice M. Labelle Alvah, Donna — Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Pp. 289. In Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946–1965, historian Donna Alvah illuminates the ways in which us military families abroad influenced global perceptions of American diplomacy, state, society, and culture. During the early Cold War period, United States military spouses and children stationed in Western Europe and Asia sought to cultivate neighbouring support and friendly relations with local people on- and off-base. By serving as "unofficial ambassadors" of "the American way of life," these ordinary Americans buttressed local us military efforts and global, Cold War diplomatic objectives. "Families … could exercise international influence and advance diplomatic aims by representing a nonmilitaristic facet of the United States," Alvah contends. "Wives, children, and servicemen in their domestic roles as husbands and fathers could exert soft-power influence that both complemented and tempered the United States' hard-power martial presence" (p. 227). Through multiple formal and informal cultural encounters with residents of occupied and host countries, American military families exercised a friendly and "feminine" form of American global power, consequently proliferating the myth of us exceptionalism. As Washington envisioned the establishment of a new Cold War order after World War II, military officials encouraged military families stationed overseas to participate in American foreign relations by fraternizing with non-Americans. In the spirit of cultural internationalism, husbands, wives, and children displayed American leadership, generosity, and benevolence as they visibly took part in myriad local events and humanitarian causes. American servicemen, at this time, were expected to "teach" local families the fruits of democracy and American culture. Such efforts depicted American dominance in a paternalist light, as "portrayals of servicemen with children … appealed to the idea of international family ties, though always with the American men in the role of adult benefactors" (p. 57). "The frequency of familial metaphors in representing relationships between servicemen and host nationals, as well as actual family relationships," Alvah convincingly argues, "illustrates the centrality of ideas [End Page 479] about the family to relations between the U.S. military and peoples of foreign countries" (p. 60). US military wives, for their part, actively advanced global aims and participated in the Cold War by forging informal international alliances and assisting disadvantaged peoples, as well as promoting American "values." Through their "feminine good will," white American women acted as US diplomatic agents, as they "represented sincere efforts to do good for those who were less privileged than Americans, while helping to ease Americans' discomfort with and even morally justify their nation's global dominance" (p. 82). On the Pacific island of Okinawa, for instance, Marian Merritt and other US military spouses sought to assist Okinawans in their postwar recovery, protect them from peril, and obtain their allegiance to the American Cold War effort. While perceiving local residents as inferior, childlike peoples in need of American guardianship, they constructed themselves as maternal protectors. "This maternalism tries to ease the negative effects of paternalistic military control while reinforcing justifications for the Cold war domination of Okinawa by the United States," Alvah contends (pp. 168–69). In an attempt to present a more friendly and compassionate picture of the American occupation of Okinawa, military wives "sought to counteract the negative effects of the military through nurturing, intimate interactions with Okinawans while maintaining the power differential" (p. 178). Unofficial Ambassadors serves as an excellent contribution to the existing scholarship on gender in US foreign relations and American internationalism. By highlighting the agency of US military wives and children abroad, Alvah draws necessary attention to the involvement of non-state actors in American diplomacy. She fails, however, to offer a substantial discussion regarding the role of US servicemen when off-duty and their interactions with local residents. How did these husbands embrace local culture and espouse these social roles? Did they engage with host citizens in the same ways as their wives? Did they promote a feminine, non-militaristic vision of the so-called American way of life? Alvah, in addition, leads...

Atomic Historiography Michael Kimmage (bio) Rosemary B. Mariner and G. Kurt Piehler, eds. The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Illustrations, bibliography, index, and notes. xxxi + 447 pp. $42.00. The large-scale periodization of American history rests on a few phrases, usually referring to a military conflict of one kind or another. There is the age of conquest, the revolutionary age, the antebellum era, the interwar years, the postwar period and, finally, the atomic or nuclear age. This is the age that began definitively with the creation of the atomic bomb, and it encompasses both the Cold War, which would not have been cold without atomic weapons, and the rise of the nuclear family. One could go a step further and describe the individualism of the postwar period as atomistic individualism, as if the mobile atom—and its power—were metaphors for modern culture and modern geopolitics alike. The Atomic Bomb and American Society, a collection of essays edited by Rosemary B. Mariner and G. Kurt Piehler, takes as its working premise the link between atomic weaponry and the drift of postwar American history. Based on a 2005 conference held in Oak Ridge, Tennessee—itself a significant site in atomic and American history—The Atomic Bomb and American Society is devoted to charting “the social swath of this atomic sword [nuclear weapons] in the context of the Cold War” and to examining the atomic bomb and “its lead role in the culture surrounding the Cold War” (pp. xix, xxiii). The included essays range from military to cultural history, from women’s history to the history of public memory. They demonstrate how wide the bomb’s “social swath” was, wider perhaps than Americans may have known during the Cold War. In the volume’s concluding essay, “The Challenges of Preserving America’s Nuclear Weapons Complex,” Jason Krupar remarks on the vastness and the relative invisibility of America’s nuclear weapons complex. “The Cold War created a national web of black spaces,” Krupar writes, “zones hidden from public sight even while located in the midst of it” (p. 399). The Atomic Bomb and American Society helps to illuminate these black spaces, without fully proving the bomb’s lead role in the culture surrounding the Cold War. In an essay that frames this volume as a whole, “Sixty Years and Counting: Nuclear Themes in American Culture, 1945 to the Present,” Paul Boyer [End Page 145] addresses the complexity of the bomb’s role in postwar American culture. A distinguished historian of American culture and the bomb, Boyer breaks this role into three phases: an early phase of anxiety, running from 1945 to the mid-1950s; a relaxation of fear in the 1960s and 1970s, after the Cuban Missile Crisis had passed without incident; and a widening fear of atomic catastrophe in the late 1970s and 1980s.1 Boyer emphasizes that nuclear fear or questions prompted by the existence of nuclear weapons were unsteady variables in American culture, waxing and waning for the duration of the Cold War. Nor did nuclear questions disappear together with the Cold War: the 1995 dispute over the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibition demonstrated precisely how unmasterable America’s nuclear past had remained, some six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.2 What did disappear after 1989, according to Boyer, was the coherence or urgency that had previously been attached to nuclear questions. “In contrast to earlier eras, a fundamental disconnect arose between politics and the popular culture” after the Cold War, Boyer writes (p. 14). Nuclear proliferation was sharply relevant as a strategic issue in the 1990s, while American popular culture was celebrating the harmless incompetence of Homer Simpson, the cartoon employee of an atomic energy plant (p. 14). And yet, the old fears were still there under the surface, made worse, in fact, by the fading of the Cold War. “During the Cold War, the adversary was at least the nation-state headed by rational leaders with whom one could negotiate,” Boyer states. “In the volatile destabilized post–Cold War world, lethal menace could lurk anywhere, and the popular culture reflected the resulting anxieties” (p. 12). One...

During the Cold War, the nature, intent, and scale of Soviet civil defense were the subject of heated debate in the West. Some analysts claimed that the USSR possessed a massive civil defense program capable of seriously destabilizing the strategic nuclear balance. This article draws on previously unexamined archival sources to investigate Soviet shelter construction from 1953, when the USSR's civil defense forces began planning for nuclear war, until the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. These documents indicate that shelter construction consumed the majority of Soviet civil defense funding and was conducted by order of the Council of Ministers. Although the shelters were inadequate both technologically and quantitatively to protect the Soviet population from an all-out U.S. thermonuclear attack, they existed in significant numbers and represented a considerable expenditure of limited Soviet resources. These new revelations provide important insights into Soviet thinking about nuclear war during the Khrushchev era.

Reviewed by: Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis, and: Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro's Cuba, and: Unfinished Business: America and Cuba after the Cold War, 1989-2001 Michael Erisman James G. Blight and Philip Brenner. Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. 352 pp. Juan J. López . Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro's Cuba. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 232 pp. Morris Morley and Chris McGillion. Unfinished Business: America and Cuba after the Cold War, 1989–2001. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 253 pp. According to Webster's Universal Unabridged Dictionary, "asymmetry" is best defined as "the want of proportion between the parts of a thing." In a political sense, however, the term is commonly used to refer to a relationship wherein there are major inequities (e.g., in power) between the parties involved, and it is this concept that provides the common thread linking the three books under consideration here. In other words, the three studies exhibit a thematic convergence in the sense that all of them, despite differences in their analytical emphases and priorities, are examining the dynamics of the asymmetries in the Cuban Revolution's foreign relations. As might be expected, there are significant variations in their attitudes toward these asymmetries; both the Blight-Brenner and the Morley-McGillion volumes are basically sympathetic with regard to the difficulties that Havana has confronted while López is quite forthright in his desire to see Washington take full advantage of the situation to destroy Castro's government. Undoubtedly the Blight-Brenner effort is the most conceptually ambitious and analytically elegant of the three books. Its main thrust focuses on Cuba's perceptions of and reactions to its asymmetrical association with the USSR and the implications thereof with respect to current U.S.-Cuban relations. Within this context the authors emphasize the 1962 Missile Crisis as an extremely traumatic primal event that triggered well-established and deeply rooted Cuban fears about the dangers inherent in any asymmetrical relationship. It is, they stress, very important to understand that there inevitably were tensions between Moscow and Havana—the Missile Crisis did not create them, but rather they were inherent in the relationship because of its asymmetrical nature and would have had a negative impact in any case. What the crisis did was to function as a catalyst that brought these preexisting strains to the surface and severely exacerbated them. Among the Soviet actions during the crisis that infuriated the Cubans were such moves as reaching an agreement with the United States to end the crisis without ever consulting Havana about the terms of the settlement or even informing the Cubans that a deal had been made. Likewise Moscow's decision, in response to pressure from Washington, to withdraw bombers and troops from Cuba was seen in Havana "as tantamount to inviting a U.S. invasion, because it demonstrated to the United States that the Soviet Union would not stand with Cuba in the face of U.S. threats" (31). These developments generated, say Blight and Brenner, a poisoned climate wherein Havana would never again really trust Moscow. In other words, the relationship would never escape the pall cast over it by the Cubans' conviction that they had been betrayed by the USSR at the height of the Missile Crisis. Indeed the basic lesson that the authors believe the Cubans took away from the Missile Crisis was that they could not trust and had to protect themselves against both of the superpowers, and that henceforth their cold war foreign policy became characterized by an [End Page 143] effort to maximize the political maneuvering space available to them within the context of these two asymmetrical relationships. This analysis of the Missile Crisis's legacy works very well when dealing with the cold war period. The epilogue then tries to incorporate the contemporary U.S.-Cuban relationship into this framework, arguing that the essential nature of the cold war Cuban-Soviet relationship that flowed from the crisis (i.e., serious tensions rooted in a mutual lack of empathy) is...

In December 1961, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower reflected that Berlin is not so much a beleaguered city or threatened city as it is a symbol - for the West, of principle, of good faith, of determination; for the Soviets, a thorn in their flesh, a wound to their pride, an impediment to their designs.1 He had played an integral part in the development of the German situation, firstly as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, and later as President of the United States. During this period Berlin was one issue around which many others were gathered. From the time of the defeat of Nazi Germany, the 'German Question' was never far from the diplomatic negotiations. As the capital of Prussia it had assumed the symbolism of German aggression and militarism, and as such it was the prize of V-E Day. When relations between the occupation powers became strained Berlin became the 'front line' of the Cold War. While the city was of little material value to either side, both East and West were willing to go to the brink of war in pursuit of its diplomatic symbolism. The Berlin Crisis of 1961 remains an important example of Cold War crisis management. The following year the contest between East and West assumed a far more sinister character with the serious threat of nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba. The contest over Berlin was as important for hs diplomatic confrontation as the Cuban crisis was over its military threat. In 1961, both East and West were trying to secure a German nation sympathetic to their own causes. The Federal Republic of Germany, with its capital in Bonn, was an active member of NATO, while the German Democratic Republic claimed its capital as Berlin and was a signatory of the Warsaw Pact. Berlin enjoyed a 'special status.' All four Occupation Powers still maintained garrisons in the city and despite the formation of West Germany in 1949, West Berlin was not incorporated as part of this new German state, but rather was maintained and supervised by the joint occupation of the United States, Great Britain and France. The 2 ½ million people living in West Berlin were joined by approximately thirteen thousand troops: a mere token when the geographical position of Berlin is taken into account. Situated one hundred and ten miles within Soviet-controlled territory, the city was militarily indefensible. The West's position was assured only so long as NATO posed a credible threat of going to war over the issue. While the term 'Berlin Crisis' may be applied to the period from 1958 to 1963, 1961 brought the climax. Tensions grew from January to July as the new Kennedy Administration struggled to establish itself while faced with already established problems. In June Soviet Premier Nikita S. Krushchev repeated a demand first specifically made in November 1958 that a peace treaty finally be signed with Germany. In August the East German government erected barricades along sector boundaries. With the erection of the Berlin Wall the Cold War gained its most sinister symbol. Germany and Berlin were officially and visibly dismembered, though this took a form very different from the wartime notion of German partition. From the time that the Allies seemed to be gaining the upper hand in Europe, tentative plans were made for postwar Europe. These plans were often inconsistent and relegated to a secondary priority after the winning of the war. The 'German Question' became a central issue in international diplomacy from the Moscow Conference of 1943 with the establishment of the European Advisory Council. In 1944, Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s proposals were put on the international stage. Various flashpoints such as the airlift of 1948 and the sealing of Berlin in 1961 brought the issue to the forefront. Arms control, national sovereignty, spheres of influence, and German rearmament were all major issues in their own right, and all of these played important roles in the 'German Question' Accordingly, Berlin assumed a value far beyond its own merit by being the focus of many other diplomatic issues between East and West. The agreements reached during the latter stages of the Second World War were designed to be temporary measures to occupy Germany during denazification and demilitarization so that the Germans could never again start an aggressive war. Zonal occupation was introduced for Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and later France. By 1961 these wartime agreements could no longer support the conflict of the Cold War. The Potsdam Protocol was repeatedly quoted in justification of the Western presence, but both sides willingly violated the protocol if h was in their interests. The Berlin Crisis of 1961 was not an isolated crisis. Consequently, the origins of the 'Berlin problem' are as significant as the crisis itself The dispute of 1961 was a direct result of the postwar occupation of Germany and was presaged by the Soviet ultimatum of 1958. The first two chapters examine these origins of the Berlin question. Chapter One concerns the postwar partition of Germany. Initially done in the spirit of Allied cooperation, this partnership soon soured. Consideration of the 'German Question' includes the Allies' insistence upon unconditional surrender, propositions for the postwar treatment of Germany as given by Morgenthau and the Department of State, as well as the conferences of Yalta and Potsdam. Special attention is given to the documents that came out of these conferences, as well as the directive known as JCS 1067. This document, along with the Potsdam Protocol, was originally intended as a temporary directive for the Allied occupation of Germany. Both assumed greater importance with the prolonged presence of Allied troops. The imposition of unconditional surrender upon the Germans was a major factor in the foreign relations of the next several years. Having inherited the 'German Question' from Roosevelt, President Truman found Europe already divided. As the postwar world polarised, Cold War diplomacy dominated foreign policy, prompting the President to develop the Truman Doctrine of containment. In this environment the Berlin Blockade and Airlift of 1948-49 became a major conflict. Chapter Two focuses on the Eisenhower Administration's relationship with the issues of Berlin. Potential for gathering international opinion was not taken by the United States during the 1953 Berlin riots. After having been relatively quiet for several years, the Berlin issue was again raised by Krushchev in 1958 where he called for a final resolution. He gave six months for this resolution to be found before he would relinquish all control over access to Berlin to East German officials. The issue was allowed to fade in 1959 with the promise of a summit meeting. Chapters Three and Four examine the Berlin Crisis of 1961, from its development to its resolution. The U-2 incident and the failed summit signalled a hardening of differences between East and West. President John F. Kennedy assumed office in January 1961 and found that to such issues as Berlin and Cuba there was no easy solution. His buildup of conventional weapons and the shoring up of the NATO alliance in anticipation of a crisis in 1961 were attempts at preventing such a confrontation. Kennedy struggled to define the crisis in order that NATO could be faced with a simple decision of what would constitute a sufficient threat to their interests to justify war. Ostensibly, internal issues led to the East German government sealing off the city of Berlin on the 13 August. As such it was not a direct threat to the occupation powers and did not prompt a strong reaction from NATO. The Warsaw Pact and NATO faced each other in the streets of Berlin. The city was in the unenviable position of being the battle ground for Cold War diplomacy. With its emotional separation of families and loved ones for almost thirty years h was the focus of the international community's condemnation of the superpower diplomacy. The construction of the Berlin Wall was the most visible representation of Cold War divisions, representing for the free world the oppression of the communist system. As such, its collapse in 1989 signalled the imminent fall of the communist world and the end of the Cold War. 1Dwight D. Eisenhower, My Views on Berlin, Saturday Evening Post, 9 December 1961. p. 28

My remarks are divided into my personal and my sociological reflections on Whole World on Fire (Eden, 2004). As an aging baby boomer – to use that awful cliche – it is hard to read Whole World on Fire without at the same time thinking about my childhood experiences growing up ‘under the shadow of the mushroom cloud’. I was too young to understand McCarthyism, but my memories of the atom bomb zeitgeist are very vivid. Until I was 12 years old, we lived in Burbank, California, home at that time to Lockheed Aircraft and, as I was often told, ground zero. I remember how Mrs Dodge, my fourth grade teacher, would be teaching us carrying or borrowing, when she would suddenly shout ‘Drop!’, and we would scramble under our seats, covering our eyes to protect us against the blinding flash of light. Later I learned that these drills prepared us for a sudden attack, when we would have less than 5 minutes. I remember my next-door neighbor, Marsha, taking me and another friend into the bomb shelter, which was a dirt trench, about 8 feet high, that her father had dug under the house. I can still remember being so scared during the Cuban Missile Crisis that I went to bed in my tennis shoes, just in case I would have to make a run for the neighbor’s shelter in the middle of the night. My mother reassured me we were in no danger, so I was shocked to find her formerly empty pantry stocked with canned goods. After we moved to a nearby suburb, I remember how impressed my friends and I were when the neighbor who owned the biggest lot built a house, a pool, and a bomb shelter. Of course, these are the memories of a child, but they do reflect the views of adults that a nuclear attack was very likely, that most people would perish, and that we should do everything we could to be among the small number of people who would survive. Years passed and some time, maybe in the 1970s and 80s, we laughed at the bomb shelters that would do no good, since we had stopped believing in a survivable nuclear war. If you were lucky enough to be born in Montana, the fallout would kill you and ultimately the world would be covered by a black dust cloud, and we would go the way of the dinosaurs. No one in their right mind – not even Ronald Reagan – believed in a survivable nuclear war. Or so I thought before reading Whole World on Fire. At one level, Whole World on Fire tells the story of how organizational processes led nuclear scientists to drastically underestimate the damage of

During the height of the cold war and nuclear brinksmanship in the 1950s and 1960s, a number of self-styled crusaders and organizations took up the challenge begun by congressional committees and Joseph McCarthy to expose and defeat the communist menace threatening the United States and the free world. For example, the Reverend Carl McIntire preached his anti-communist message throughout the United States, published innumerable tracts such as Communism Is of the Devil, and through the 20th Century Reformation Hour, broadcast a thirty-minute radio message Monday through Friday. The Reverend Billy James Hargis formed the anti-communist Christian Crusade, toured the country with numerous rally's for God and against communism, and broadcast his messages on hundreds of radio stations. The largest, most thoroughly organized, and visible effort began when Robert Welch, a retired candy company executive, met in Indianapolis on December 9 and 10, 1958 with eleven handpicked businessmen. Welch delivered a two-day speech in which he identified the as Our immediate and most urgent anxiety. (1) He warned his business friends that: .. you have only a few more years before the country in which you live will become four separate provinces in a world-wide Communist dominion ruled by police-state methods from the Kremlin.... We are living, in America today, in such a fool's paradise as the people of China lived in twenty years ago, as the people of Czechoslovakia lived in a dozen years ago, as the people of North Vietnam lived in five years ago, and as the people of Iraq lived in only yesterday. (2) This speech became The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, named after a U.S. Array captain apparently killed by Communist Chinese soldiers at the end of World War II. Birch became the Society's first of the cold war, and Welch became the Society's unquestioned, authoritarian leader. (3) He had devoted the previous three years of his life to studying the world situation and the communist conspiracy, so he alone was capable of leading the life and death struggle against freedom's archenemy. At its peak in the mid-1960s, following two near-nuclear wars (the Berlin Crisis in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962) and when thousands of Americans were building bomb shelters in their basements and backyards in anticipation of a nuclear holocaust, the Birch Society had hundreds of chapters throughout the country, 100,000 members, 400 American Opinion bookstores to distribute and sell its literature, and an active cadre of speakers that crisscrossed the country. The Society's declared purpose was to educate the American people to the dangers of the communist conspiracy, expose communism and communists everywhere, and stop the conspiracy's planned takeover of the United States and the free world. The media and many American leaders branded the Society as an extremist, ultra-right, fringe group that saw communists behind every tree and under every bed and had the audacity to slander American heroes such as George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, accusing them of being conscious or unwitting supporters of the communist conspiracy. Convinced that such criticisms came from those who were ignorant of the conspiracy or part of it, Welch and his followers remained committed to the cause. As the cold war began to thaw and the threat of nuclear war seemed increasingly remote, McIntire, Hargis, and other anti-communist speakers and groups disappeared from the scene. The Birch Society continued the crusade, but its membership declined during the Reagan-Bush years to below 50,000 members. It faced severe economic problems as income dropped and it tried to maintain headquarters on both the east and west coasts. (4) The Society suffered a demoralizing leadership vacuum when, first, its young, charismatic president, Congressman Lawrence McDonald, was, in their words, a martyr who murdered by assassination in the mid-air massacre of Korean Airlines Flight 007 in 1983 when Soviet fighter planes shot it down after it strayed into Soviet air space north of Japan. …

Including extensive, balanced information, keen insights, and helpful research tools, this book provides a valuable resource for students or general readers interested in American policy, diplomacy, and conduct during the Cold War. The Cold War not only comprised the dominant theme in American foreign policy during the second half of the 20th century; its influence was also imbedded into American culture. The half-century duration of the Cold War was an extended learning period during which the United States found that it could no longer remain an isolationist nation in a complex, quickly evolving, and dangerous world. This book covers the entire scope of the Cold War, from its background and origins before and after World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, providing coverage of key events and concepts, such as the containment policy, McCarthyism, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, détente, and nuclear arms policies. The single-volume work also provides an annotated bibliography, primary documents, and biographies of key personalities during the Cold War, such as John Foster Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover, George F. Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Edward R. Murrow, and Ronald Reagan.

Until now, the history of the Cold War has been written as a series of diplomatic and military events: the Berlin airlift, the Korean War, the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, and countless covert and rhetorical maneuvers. When communism finally collapsed in 1989, it was suddenly obvious that economics had played a major role in the war. But what role exactly? Did the West succeed simply by the hidden hand of its markets? Or did Western powers offer direct and successful economic leadership? The answer is that our economic policy was key to the war, even more central and important than military might. Since World War II, in a world of democratic powers and peripheral combat, economic diplomacy has become the chief engine of global politics and prosperity. In a book that will take its place alongside the great diplomatic histories of the period, Diane Kunz offers a definitive history of 50 years of American economic diplomacy. From the Marshall Plan, to Bretton Woods, the Suez Crisis, the Alliance for Progress, the oil shocks, and beyond, America's international economic leadership has been controversial, at times misguided, difficult to sustain, yet ultimately triumphant. Though traditional wisdom insists that leaders must choose guns or butter that arms and prosperity are at odds Kunz argues the controversial thesis that America's economic and security policies worked hand-in-glove. With the great cause of containing communism as a driving force, presidents from Truman to Reagan built a nation both prosperous and strong while helping America's allies to achieve similar strengths. Diane Kunz's masterful narrative recounts the missing story at the heart of the American century.

Introduction: Black Laughs Matter

Reviewed by: Wars of the Cold War: Campaigns and Conflicts, 1945–1990 Ralph Hitchens Wars of the Cold War: Campaigns and Conflicts, 1945–1990. By David Stone. London: Brassey’s, 2004. ISBN 1-85753-342-9. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography and sources. Index. Pp. 336. £25.00. It is no shame to bite off more than you can chew. David Stone, a retired British officer and prolific military writer, covers some of the military high points of the forty-five-year period we remember as the Cold War. He delivers some serviceable narratives before losing focus in a welter of sociopolitical musing at the end. Stone begins with some "non-wars" of the Cold War, such as the Berlin Airlift, Soviet suppression of the Hungarian and Czech revolts, and the Cuban Missile crisis. He includes a brief net assessment of the two treaty organizations, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, revealing a weakness for quantitative comparisons—divisions, tanks, aircraft—that have always looked alarming but need to be put into context, very little of which Stone provides. The longstanding Soviet quantitative superiority was never taken for granted east of the inner German border, while in the West it was frankly assumed that a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict could never remain subnuclear. What stabilized the Cold War in spite of the conventional force imbalance in central Europe was, of course, the strategic nuclear balance and the powerful concept of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD). Stone acknowledges the utility of MAD while simultaneously blaming it for fueling the nuclear arms race, a simplistic interpretation of a nuanced concept. Beneath the strategic nuclear umbrella a plethora of wars broke out that involved the superpowers to greater or lesser degrees within carefully observed regional bounds. Stone competently summarizes the most significant of these: Korea, the French and American wars in Vietnam, the Malayan insurgency, the Algerian revolt, the Arab-Israeli wars, several African wars, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and the Iran-Iraq War. However, military professionals will learn relatively little that is new, as Stone paints from a thin palette of secondary sources. Writing at length about the battle of Dien Bien [End Page 276] Phu, he overlooks Bernard Fall's definitive Hell in a Very Small Place; likewise, in his narrative of the Arab-Israeli wars he bypasses Trevor Dupuy's Elusive Victory. With regard to the Soviet war in Afghanistan Stone does his best with a few dated sources written mainly from the Mujahedin perspective, but a skilled historian would recognize the glaring absence of detailed information about the Soviet conduct of the war. (A definitive work awaits further inroads into the Soviet-era archives of the General Staff, and/or declassification of the National Security Agency's extensive intelligence reporting on the war.) Throughout his book Stone also makes extensive use of the Orbis "War in Peace" series of monographs, which are excellent in many respects but must be regarded as tertiary sources. Stone's judgments about the American war in Vietnam deserve some comment. It is common enough to overcredit a naïve, sensationalist media and the antiwar movement for America's defeat, but Stone goes a step further. President Nixon, he claims, betrayed South Vietnam twice: first by seeking a negotiated peace agreement instead of allowing Saigon to carry the ground war into the North after the Hanoi's 1972 "Easter Offensive" had been halted; and secondly by promising South Vietnam that the U.S. would retaliate if Hanoi violated the Paris Accords—a promise "Nixon must have known he could not honour." Neither claim can withstand much scrutiny in light of what was known at the time, and Stone seriously undercuts his credibility as a historian in putting them forward. The final chapter of the book is a long, tendentious op-ed piece, rooted in the disaffections of a conservative ideology rather than sober analysis of the underlying trends in the post–Cold War era. In one bizarre passage Stone warns: "the excessively high profile accorded to human rights and civil liberties issues must be rationalized and modified, so that they are at the very least balanced by common-sense and lawfulness to reflect the needs of the majority rather...

This chapter examines the offensive strategies employed by the United States and the Soviet Union in fighting the Cold War. It begins with a discussion of US covert operations and its revised national security strategy, focusing on Operation Solarium, the search for a post-Solarium national security policy, and subversion and intelligence gathering. It then considers the Berlin Crises, noting that Berlin was at the heart of the Cold War, the heart of the German question, and on several occasions became the focus of tension between the two blocs in Europe. The airlift of 1948–9 to preserve the Western position in the city, which was an island in East Germany, had become a potent Cold War symbol. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the Offshore Islands Crises and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This chapter examines the offensive strategies employed by the United States and the Soviet Union in fighting the Cold War. It begins with a discussion of US covert operations and its revised national security strategy, focusing on Operation Solarium, the search for a post-Solarium national security policy, and subversion and intelligence gathering. It then considers the Berlin crises, noting that Berlin was at the heart of the Cold War, the heart of the German question, and on several occasions became the focus of tension between the two blocs in Europe. The airlift of 1948–9 to preserve the Western position in the city, which was an island in East Germany, had become a potent Cold War symbol. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the Offshore Islands crises and the Cuban missile crisis.

1. The Cuban missile crisis: what can we know, why did it start, how did it end? Robert Jervis 2. Examining The Fourteenth Day: studying the neglected aftermath period of the October Cuban missile crisis, and underscoring missed analytical opportunities Barton Bernstein 3. Prime Minister and President: Harold Macmillan's accounts of the Cuban missile crisis, Peter Catterall 4. Reform or revolution? Scott Sagan's Limits of Safety and its contemporary implications Campbell Craig 5. The 'Best and the Brightest': the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy administration and the lessons of history R. Gerald Hughes 6. The three puzzles: Essence of Decision and the missile crisis Don Munton 7. We all lost the 'Cuban missile crisis': revisiting Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein's landmark analysis in We All Lost the Cold War Benoit Pelopidas 8. On hedgehogs and passions: history, hearsay, and hotchpotch in the writing of the Cuban missile crisis Sergey Radchenko 9. Beyond the smoke and mirrors: the real JFK White House Cuban missile crisis, Sheldon M. Stern 10. 'The only thing to look forward to's the past': reflection, revision and reinterpreting reinterpretation Len Scott

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) is the first installment in Stanley Kubrick’s so-called futurist trilogy, followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971). Curiously, Dr. Strangelove is not set in an imagined future. It takes place in an alternate, counterfactual Cold War present that culminates in apocalyptic destruction when maladroit American and Soviet leaders enable the detonation of a nuclear bomb. The film is more often associated with the genres of war and black comedy than science fiction. Given its representations of technocultural affect, inner space, and apocalypse, however, Dr. Strangelove is thoroughly science-fictional, and all three films received SF’s top honor, the Hugo Award, for Best Dramatic Presentation while siphoning themes from SF’s locus classicus, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). With respect to Kubrick’s oeuvre, the “nightmare comedy,” as it has been called, distinguished the up-and-coming director as an innovative filmmaker and auteur. He had made waves with his previous film, Lolita (1962), which also featured the talents of versatile actor Peter Sellers, but Dr. Strangelove achieved new heights of cinema and storytelling, combining wild satire with our darkest fears. More specifically, Dr. Strangelove sardonically critiques and fetishizes the destructive technologies that animate male desire, conflating sex, death, and technology in a way that caricatures the phallus via “serious” monkey business. Part documentary realism, the movie was adapted from Red Alert (1958)—published in the United Kingdom as Two Hours to Doom—a suspense novel by Peter George (pseudonym Peter Bryant) that he, Kubrick, and writer Terry Southern converted into an absurdist romp. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 spurred Cold War anxiety, and another Atomic Age film, Fail-Safe (1964), came out later the same year; unlike Dr. Strangelove, it is a straight, humorless thriller, but it so closely resembled Red Alert that Kubrick and his producer James B. Harris sued for copyright infringement. Despite recognition in the 1960s, Fail-Safe has primarily been discussed in conjunction with Dr. Strangelove, which became part of the popular zeitgeist and remains a polestar in Kubrick’s legacy as well as cinematic history. Critics are drawn to Kubrick as much as cinephiles and general moviegoers; few filmmakers can boast a collective library of work that is at once entertaining and intellectual, evoking powerful emotional responses with an appreciation of his films’ stylistic and narrative construction. As such, the profusion of popular articles, opinion-pieces, and reviews on Dr. Strangelove has gained momentum alongside a wealth of scholarly material. This bibliography mainly accounts for academic scholarship in the form of monographs, full-length articles published in peer-reviewed journals, essays in anthologies, chapters in Kubrick biographies and comprehensive studies of his oeuvre, and other pertinent miscellany.