Missile Crisis Research Articles

Atomic Americans: Citizens in a Nuclear State by Sarah E. Robey (review).

Reviewed by: Atomic Americans: Citizens in a Nuclear State by Sarah E. Robey William M. Knoblauch (bio) Atomic Americans: Citizens in a Nuclear State By Sarah E. Robey. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022. Pp. 240. In Atomic Americans, historian Sarah E. Robey examines how in the decades immediately following World War II, citizens worked within nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in order to lead the U.S. government to construct a Civil Defense state. To do so, she relies heavily on documents from these organizations, including letters, pamphlets, and films, alongside news reports and government archives, all to paint a vivid picture of an American electorate scrambling to save themselves from the bomb. By the 1949 detonation of a Soviet atomic bomb, such fears were warranted. With the American atomic monopoly over in just four short years, U.S. citizens, for perhaps the first time ever, began to ponder how to protect themselves from foreign attack. Tensions only escalated at the dawn of the thermonuclear age in the early 1950s, and political leaders, such as Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, seemed to be ineffectual in providing succor to nervous citizens. In response, myriad NGO groups acted, mobilized public support, and ultimately influenced the 1963 landmark Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT). Robey's argument aligns with previous works such as Kenneth D. Rose's One Nation Underground and Laura McEnaney's Civil Defense Begins at Home. Both examine civil defense efforts—and specifically the bomb shelter craze—in early atomic America. Like these works, Robey argues that concerned citizens faced a federal response to the nuclear threat that was, at best, noncommittal: "Bound by a host of competing political, fiscal, and logistical priorities … policymakers and government agencies … placed the onus of survival on individual Americans themselves" (p. 171). Faced with this reality, many Americans joined organizations that called for government initiatives to construct civil defense structures. Robey is convincing in showing that while the U.S. government resisted federal projects or mandates—mostly to set themselves apart from an autocratic Soviet Union with whom they were engaged in the Cold War—many citizens still sought national-level help. Their activism, Robey concludes, "created an important site of Cold War political engagement [and] also formed the very contours of what it meant to be a citizen in the Atomic Age" (pp. 171–72). Robey's analysis of Civil Defense–related media—specifically short films and pamphlets—shows that there was a concerted effort to demystify nuclear science using emerging technologies of popular media. Frequently, scientific characters, often identifiable by their donning of a white lab coat, explained [End Page 1243] to unwitting film characters that nuclear science was not all that difficult or even dangerous. By breaking down the effects of an atomic attack (i.e., blast, heat, radioactivity), citizens could begin to parse out methods to protect themselves, such as they might against, say, a tornado or some other natural disaster. Another avenue for demystifying nuclear fears was through gender roles, often enlisting housewives to be the planners in charge of maintaining food stockpiles should a bomb explode. Through these methods, Robey shows that the Federal Civil Defense Agency (FCDA) strained to explain nuclear technology to lay citizens via metaphor, supposed expertise, and gender norms. The façade of safety, however, could not withstand the realities of radioactive fallout; by the early 1960s, activism to contain this danger reached a fever pitch. Robey's conclusion—that this antinuclear activism contributed to the 1963 nuclear Test Ban Treaty—is sound, but it downplays the impact of fears that intensified after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Additionally, her arguments, however balanced and conservative, may overstate how effectual these civic-minded organizations were in confronting a U.S. government recalcitrant to restrain its nuclear ambitions. Of course, assigning causality is a difficult job for any historian, but Robey might have taken a more robust stand. Instead of showing the "contours of being a citizen" or the "dilemmas of nuclear citizenship," why not stake a claim? Still, Robey shows that behind every contour traced or dilemma confronted, fears of dying in a terrifying thermonuclear war remained. These concerned citizens may not have understood the...

The Limits of Détente: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1969–1973

The Limits of Détente: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1969–1973

175th Anniversary of the American Annals of the Deaf: Part III-1961 to the Present.

175th Anniversary of the American Annals of the Deaf: Part III—1961 to the Present Peter V. Paul The editorial for this issue is the third and final rendition of a celebration of the 175th anniversary of the American Annals of the Deaf. In this issue, I cover the period from 1961 to the present. Much as in the editorials in the two previous celebration issues (Paul, 2022a, 2022b), my initial primary focus was on articles covering various aspects of the development of language and literacy. However, here I have strayed from this original emphasis to discuss other interesting, perhaps groundbreaking articles. The time frame covered by this editorial, and by this special Annals issue, has been marked by stark economic and political events in America. These include the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the emergence of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, the stock market crash of 1987, and the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan—to name a few. Events that have affected the education and social welfare of individuals of color, those with disabilities, and others include the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, better known as Public Law 94-142 (and subsequently amended several times), the American With Disabilities Act, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. The period since 1961 has also seen the rise of inclusion and the disability rights movement, challenging the utility and effectiveness of special education programs and services and our long-standing perspectives on constructs such as disability and deafness. I could go on—think of the explosive impact of the Internet and the introduction of transformational digital devices (e.g., iPads, iPhones) and social media platforms. Oh yeah, Gallaudet University appointed its first deaf president in 1988. And I was proud to be selected the first deaf editor of the Annals in 2011. Range of topics There was no avoiding the challenge posed by the selection of articles for discussion and the few chosen for reprinting in this issue. Initially, I was intrigued by the titles and quick perusals of 146 articles. This was a smaller number than those I considered for the first celebration issue (194), and much smaller than the total contemplated for the second (338). Looking at issues from 1998 to about 2010, I was captivated by a few of the editorials by the previous Annals editor, Donald F. Moores, covering controversial and interesting topics such as demography (Moores, 2001a), teacher preparation (Moores, 2003), the No Child Left Behind Act (Moores, 2004), and residential schools (Moores, 2009). Several of his editorials on cochlear implants were also of interest (Moores, 2002, 2005, 2008–2009, 2010). Perhaps Moores’s approach and style of writing served as an inspiration for my editorials. [End Page 407] Looking at articles from the inception of my editorship in 2011 to the present, I found it difficult to select articles to read (again!) and discuss or to highlight as reprints. In fact, making selections for the 50 years from 1961 to 2011 was equally difficult because I had read and synthesized a number of articles on a range of topics—such as American Sign Language– English bilingualism, Cued Speech, the developmental differences between deaf children of deaf parents and deaf children of hearing parents, language and literacy development, lipreading/speechreading, signed systems, and vocabulary—in writing my own published works. I hope that some of my readers are familiar with my stances on these issues. Of course, I promise not to say anything more here about the qualitative similarity hypothesis (Wang & Andrews, 2014, 2015). As usual, the Annals contained information on a wide range of topics—not only the above-mentioned cochlear implants (pros and cons!), Cued Speech, inclusion, and digital technology, but also communication and signed systems, instructional television, intelligence (oh, the debates…), internal speech, locus of control, mainstreaming, mathematics, the purpose of science in the curriculum, signed language, speech and hearing issues, Visual Phonics, visual sequential memory, and on and on. Several issues of the Annals provided lists of speech and hearing centers, organizations and associations (National Association of the Deaf, etc...

The Cuban Missile Crisis: Miscalculation, Nuclear Risks, and the Human Dimension

The Cuban Missile Crisis: Miscalculation, Nuclear Risks, and the Human Dimension

Soviet-Cuban relations after the Caribbean crisis, the collapse of détente and lessons for the future

The results of the Caribbean crisis in the domestic and foreign literature have rarely been covered from the point of view of the Soviet-Cuban relations that influenced the internationalist policy of Cuba in Africa in the 1970s. The author analyzes: the degree of independence of Cuba’s policy in Africa, the participation of the USSR in it and the fairness of accusations brought by Washington. The results of the analysis show that deploying of Cuban “volunteers” in Angola and then in Ethiopia was not initiated by the USSR, which aimed at maintaining détente in relations with the West. Moreover, new deterioration of relations with Cuba amid escalating Chinese-Soviet tensions, increasing centrifugal tendencies in the “socialist commonwealth” and emergence of “Eurocommunism” threatened to further weaken the “world system of socialism” and erode the ideological foundations of Marxism-Leninism. By analyzing Cuba’s internationalist activity in Africa, the author has been able to draw some conclusions about its implications for the international communist movement and its influence on the balance of power in the world before perestroika policy began in the Soviet Union. The end of détente policy did not allow the USSR to redirect the resources released from the arms race to improving the living conditions of the Soviet people. Cuban revolutionary activity contributed to fragmentation of the formerly united “upfront antiimperialist forces.” The weakening of the ideological foundations of “real socialism” was an additional factor that prompted the Soviet leadership, represented by Mikhail Gorbachev, to begin a policy of perestroika. Cuba’s ‘progress’ in Africa contributed to consolidation of Cuban society around the policy of the Cuban Communist Party, which, in turn, helped it to withstand the difficulties of the “peculiar period of peace” in the early 1990s.

Time pressures under international crises reconsidered: Integrating real and experimental time

This study discusses the relationship between the time pressure faced by policymakers when an international military-security crisis breaks out and the consequences of the crisis. If a policy is decided too quickly, decision-makers do not have the ability to consider enough alternatives and information, which lowers the chances of averting a crisis. Moreover, if too much time is taken in deliberating, an international crisis may heat up and the chance to potentially come up with an optimal policy at the right time may be missed. The article takes a mixed methods approach using quantitative data and three case studies. The International Crisis Behavior (ICB, version 13) dataset was used to identify the time spent in making policy decisions to respond to an international crisis and the consequences of the crisis, for the period 1918–2013. Also, three actual international crises were analyzed: Russia's annexation of Crimea and Donbas, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Korean War. The quantitative results and the case analyses indicate that a third alternative, a medium time span, allows for careful deliberation and sufficient information gathering to occur, and decision-makers may thereby avoid an international crisis.

Masculinity and the Cuban Missile Crisis: gender as pre-emptive deterrent

Abstract Sixty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, academics and policy-makers still pore over the details for lessons in foreign policy. In those details, participants and observers regularly remark on the gendered dynamics of the crisis. Despite such observations and the vastness of the missile crisis literature, there remains little explicitly gendered research. This study takes up the feminist IR question ‘What work is gender doing here?’ by comparing the masculine performances of Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy. It finds that the three leaders embraced similar masculine traits in themselves that they denied in each other and that gender operated as a preemptive deterrent to mindsets and approaches considered feminine, such as diplomacy and negotiation. The ongoing pursuit of masculinity, particularly toughness and cool-headed rationality, were powerful though underappreciated motivations that introduced biases and counterproductive decisions, whereas purportedly feminine options—cooperation and negotiation—were rejected out of hand, never arose, or were concealed from the public. Gender analysis of security events challenges claims to rationally-driven brinkmanship and the counterproductive limitation of options. As crisis unfolds, awareness of how gender can operate as a preemptive deterrent can serve to keep more options and negotiable details on the table.

Adapting Critical Oral History Methodology to Freedom Movement Studies

ABSTRACT In the 1980s and 1990s, scholars James Blight and janet Lang created a methodology, called critical oral history (COH), as part of their investigation of the origins of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. This article explores how our team of freedom movement veterans and scholars adapted the COH methodology during six years of experimentation between 2015-2021, as we drove for a deeper understanding of the US civil rights/Black Power freedom movement. We examine what part of the COH worked, what did not, and what innovations emerged.

Author Response

Author Response

Undercover Algorithm: A Secret Chapter in the Early History of Artificial Intelligence and Satellite Imagery

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, computer algorithms accurately and rapidly identify features of some objects on digital satellite imagery. These feature-recognition algorithms are expected to transform geospatial intelligence: to enable rapid retrospective searching of imagery archives and focus prospective analytic attention. This Perspective article establishes the beginning of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s research and development on this capability. Archival research of declassified Central Intelligence Agency documents produced two discoveries: one identifies that the earliest feature-recognition initiative predated the creation of the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in January 1961. The other discovery reveals that the earliest neural network software, Frank Rosenblatt’s Mark I Perceptron, from which current feature-detection software descends, had been part of a previously secret four-year NPIC effort from 1963 through 1966 to develop this algorithm into a useful tool for photo-interpreters. The manager of that research effort, John Cain, defined the prospective utility of this software in 1963, and Cain’s criteria, derived from NPIC’s experience during the Cuban Missile Crisis, continues to shape the prospective geospatial intelligence uses of feature-recognition software.

The Solomons-China 2022 security deal: extraterritoriality and the perils of militarisation in the Pacific Islands

ABSTRACT A security deal struck between the Solomon Islands and China in April 2022 has been depicted as the precursor to the establishment of a Chinese naval base in the Pacific. Fed by the proximity of an Australian federal election, these fears have stimulated lurid images in the Australian press of Beijing's aircraft carriers being stationed off Brisbane's coast creating a Pacific version of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. In this paper, we examine the provisions of the ‘framework agreement’, explore its rationale and consider the likelihood that the predicted naval base eventuates. We also investigate Chinese extraterritoriality on the global stage and Chinese commercial activity in the Solomons since the switch in diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 2019. We argue that Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare signed the deal primarily in response to domestic pressures, in particular the danger of a repeat of major riots that took place in the capital in November 2021. The most pressing risk is not Chinese warships or nuclear missiles stationed in Honiara, but repression to handle urban unrest without the restraint required of Australian, Papua New Guinean, Fijian or New Zealand police officers.

The discipline that came in from the cold: American human geography becomes a Cold War social science

The high–Cold War period – from the Truman doctrine to the Cuban missile crisis – brought not only profound changes in geography but also profound changes to Geography. The discipline moved from a museum-like, fusty subject to aspiring to be a Cold War, cutting-edge hybrid social science (or behavioural science) ‘cross-bred’ with physical and applied sciences. The vehicle was social physics. Its origins were in the 17th century, but the actual name was not coined until 1835 and then in French, ‘Physique Sociale’, by the Belgian astronomer, statistician and social tabulator, Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874). As a project, social physics rested on the belief of monism in which the same formal explanatory scientific principles held in both natural and social worlds. In the particular case of Cold War geography, monism meant asserting that specifically Newtonian equations describing the movements of celestial bodies in the heavens could explain equally as well movements of human bodies down on earth. In American human geography, social physics was pioneered from the early 1950s by William Warntz, who collaborated early on with the Princeton astrophysicist, John Stewart, who, in turn, had previously worked with the Harvard linguist, George Zipf. Together Warntz and Stewart using home-made early computing devices and drawing on Newtonian formulations of potential cast geography as social physics, extolling its virtues as ‘macrogeography’ and on par with other disciplines that already had entered the Pantheon of Cold War social science.

Making decisions under uncertainty: The Prudent Judgement Approach

AbstractThis article offers an alternative conceptualisation of prudence as encompassing four normative components: reflective reasoning, experience, long-term well-being, and moderation. Prudence involves a pattern of reflective reasoning informed by experience in the pursuit of long-term well-being through moderate judgements and actions. This conceptualisation allows distilling a set of prescriptions for guiding deliberation and choice under uncertainty, which I name the Prudent Judgement Approach. An analysis of John F. Kennedy's deliberations at the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis uncovers evidence of prudent judgement and demonstrates the practical feasibility and value of this approach. Although the numerous cognitive and procedural sources of errors in decision-making under uncertainty are by now well understood, there are few prescriptive approaches for guiding the process of formulating judgements and making choices. This article shows how prudence can help improve the quality of deliberative processes and policy choices.

Strategic Unpredictability: Assessing the Doctrine from Nixon to Putin

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump suggested the United States could benefit from a more unpredictable foreign policy. The assassination of Iranian Major-General Qasem Soleimani by US forces in 2020 during the Trump administration may be the best recent example of this doctrine in action. Other American presidents, including John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, have applied it in different ways. Historical comparisons of its use in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the conflicts in Vietnam and Kosovo suggest that the expected liabilities of the strategy outweigh any likely gains. Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be seeking to establish strategic unpredictability by threatening NATO with nuclear escalation should it interfere heavily in Russia’s war in Ukraine. This threat, however, has not deterred NATO from providing effective assistance to Ukraine. Policymakers should be deeply sceptical about the benefits of strategic unpredictability.

Review essay: the nuclear curse

The five books under review address nuclear weapons and the risk of war during the Cold War. Four of the five contend this risk was higher than understood by policymakers at the time or many scholars in its aftermath. They attribute this risk to strategic alerts, close encounters of opposing forces in crisis, and lack of access to critical intelligence. They consider the superpowers to have emerged unscathed from the Cuban missile crisis as much due to luck as leader commitments to avoid war. I interrogate the concept of “luck” and use my analysis to evaluate these arguments.

Speaking Truth to Power in a Dictatorship: Secular Ideology versus Islamic Realpolitik—A Fierce Dispute in Ṣaddām’s Iraq

ABSTRACT In July 1986, a dramatic top-secret meeting of the Baʿth Pan Arab Leadership, the party’s highest ideological body, fully recorded by Ṣaddām Ḥussein, took place in wartime Baghdad. This meeting is thrice unique. First, the medium, an unabridged, audio-recording. Second, the topic, the dilemma of many Middle Eastern ruling regimes, vacillating between a secular, or semi-secular ideology and Islamic political expediency. In the case of the Baʿth, a more secular and ideological movement than most, this dilemma is particularly poignant. Third, it is exposing a bitter clash between a brutal dictator, who had executed comrades for opposing him, and three brave lieutenants. On the surface it was convened to discuss a tactical alliance with a sworn enemy, the Muslim Brethren (MB). At a dangerous moment in the Iraq-Iran War, Ṣaddām identified swelling popular religiosity. He hoped that an alliance with the MB would blunt criticism of his regime’s secularism. All the same, some participants feared that secular Arabism, the central tenet of Baʿthi faith, was at stake. Unexpectedly, the meeting produced a startling drama. Albeit temporarily, it forced Ṣaddām to take one step back. Other ideologically oriented dictators, such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Ḥāfiẓ al-Assad, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, too, faced ideology-politics dilemmas, yet none of them left such a surprising chronicle. A similar audio recording also comes to mind that offers a rare verbatim meeting of the inner working of a county’s highest institution at a moment of crisis – the transcripts of Kennedy’s ExComm during the Cuban Missile Crisis. While it deliberated an existential global matter and took place in a democracy, one sees similarities, namely, its detail, the exposure of emotional charges, the ability to speak truth to power, and the benefit resulting from that ability.

Measuring Geopolitical Risk

We present a news-based measure of adverse geopolitical events and associated risks. The geopolitical risk (GPR) index spikes around the two world wars, at the beginning of the Korean War, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and after 9/11. Higher geopolitical risk foreshadows lower investment and employment and is associated with higher disaster probability and larger downside risks. The adverse consequences of the GPR index are driven by both the threat and the realization of adverse geopolitical events. We complement our aggregate measures with industry- and firm-level indicators of geopolitical risk. Investment drops more in industries that are exposed to aggregate geopolitical risk. Higher firm-level geopolitical risk is associated with lower firm-level investment. (JEL C43, E32, F51, F52, G31, H56, N40)

Stranger Things, Nostalgia, and Aesthetics

<i>Stranger Things</i>, Nostalgia, and Aesthetics

Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1945–1962, by Martin J. Sherwin

Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1945–1962, by Martin J. Sherwin

Measuring Geopolitical Risk

&lt;ns2:p&gt;We present a news-based measure of adverse geopolitical events and associated risks. The geopolitical risk (GPR) index spikes around the two world wars, at the beginning of the Korean War, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and after 9/11. Higher geopolitical risk foreshadows lower investment and employment and is associated with higher disaster probability and larger downside risks. The adverse consequences of the GPR index are driven by both the threat and the realization of adverse geopolitical events. We complement our aggregate measures with industry- and firm-level indicators of geopolitical risk. Investment drops more in industries that are exposed to aggregate geopolitical risk. Higher firm-level geopolitical risk is associated with lower firm-level investment.&lt;/ns2:p&gt;