Ofthe Cold War Research Articles

The Gradual Changes of the Attitude of Czechoslovak Diplomacy toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict during the 1948–1967 Period

This study examines the evolution of Czechoslovak foreign policy towardsselected actors of Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948–1967. Once very friendlyrelations of Czechoslovakia with Israel were soon replaced by a graduallydeveloping cooperation with some Arab actors. However, even thispartnership encountered several diffcult moments. Despite long-termideological disputes with Arab nationalist leaders, Czechoslovakiademonstrated unconditional support for the Arab coalition in the Six-DayWar (1967), and the pro-Arab orientation had become the unquestionableline of Czechoslovak Middle East policy in the Cold War. Since the article isbased on the New Cold War History approach, in addition to the previouslyunpublished information from the archival documents it also aims to offer apartial interpretation of Czechoslovakia’s diplomatic position as a satellitestate of the Soviet Union with regard to its foreign policy strategies towardsselected Middle Eastern Third world countries in the first two decades ofthe Cold War.

West Germany's Cold War Radio: A Crucible of the Transatlantic Century

“Mr. Radio (der Radio) is man’s greatest achievement,” a young Bavariannamed Maxl announced in the op-ed column of Der Rundfunkhörer, a journalof the state’s listener advocacy association, in April 1954.1 His initialenthusiasm, the letter made obvious, fizzled out fast. Elsewhere, Mr. Radiomay well have been a paragon of mobile greatness, road-ready thanks tocars and portable following the introduction of transistors in 1953.2 Yet, hiscountry’s Mr. Radio, Maxl regretfully remarked, was deeply flawed, andthis circumstance had nothing to do with the advances of this “gentleman’s”televisual competitor, which would need as many as six more years to reacha quarter of all households.3 Rather, a slew of intrinsic shortcomingsplagued the imaginary character’s transmission, programming, and receptionin Maxl’s family residence—the home of the West German everyman.The purposefully naïve wording of the boy’s letter, possibly penned by theeditor and association’s president Hans Gebhard, whose own frequent contributionswere nearly identical in tenor and substance, barely veiled a longlist of tongue-in-cheek complaints. The latter showed just how vulnerableradio, this “hegemon of domestic leisure,” was during the first full decade ofthe Cold War—the seminal overture to this special issue’s chronology.4

Why and When We Study the Arctic in Canada

In the study of Canadian foreign policy, interest in the is far from constant; it waxes and wanes. When the is on the agenda, some argue that it receives disproportionately high attention; when it is off the agenda, there are calls for more attention to the issue.1 Currently, are in the midst of a surge in public interest in the the likes of which we have not experienced since the days ofthe Cold War.2 Given these strong fluctuations and the current trend, it is worth asking why and when we study and discuss the Arctic. This article traces the fluctuations in attention to the and provides some reflections on why these have occurred. To that end it adopts a historical perspective and draws on the Canadian foreign relations index.The Canadian foreign relations index lists works, documents, speeches, and publications in Canadian foreign policy since 1945. Formerly compiled by the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, it is currently housed and compiled by the John Holmes library at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. Thanks to this resource, it is possible to determine when commentators and researchers have focused on the and when they neglected it. As will be seen, an analysis ofthe index's 690 references that focus on the indicates that in Canada, there is no one age ofthe to use Young's formula, but three - between 1969 and 1977, between 1983 and 1991, and from 2006 onwards.3 During these three periods, the figured as an important issue, whereas outside these periods it was only a secondary matter of concern. These periods correspond, respectively and with some qualifications, to the prime ministerships of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1968-79 and 1980-84), Brian Mulroney (1984-93) and Steven Harper (since 2006).The is a politicized issue, which means that it is politically charged or carries considerable political salience. Obviously, no theme is without political implications in Canadian foreign policy and all issues are politicized to a degree. Foreign policy, as with any other field in social science, is inevitably linked to the political and social context from which it emerges. No field of social science can be analyzed or understood in isolation from the social and political context in which it is steeped. Nonetheless, issues are not uniformly politicized and there are specific logics at play. For example, the question of Quebec was only addressed extensively from the end of the 1960s, and the first article dealing with gender issues and the role of women in Canadian foreign policy was published only in 1985.4In this article, the focus is on what determines interest in the Arctic. To identify these determinants, this article focuses on the three periods mentioned above. It analyzes the themes common to them, but also the specific character of each. It concludes with a discussion of why the has been heavily studied in some periods and neglected in others. The attention of commentators and researchers has fluctuated along complex lines, and the conclusion presents some of these.METHOD AND RESULTSThe Canadian foreign relations index is representative of the works produced in Canadian foreign policy: in September 2009 it listed more than 50,000 references from 1945 onwards. It is therefore a useful tool to study foreign policy and its evolution in Canada.5Since the focus here is on the study of the Arctic, only the 28,695 scientific works listed (including articles published in newspaper and magazines) were considered. Political speeches and institutional documents were excluded from the sample. Then, works dealing with the were isolated, thanks to the identified by the managers of the database. Among the 28,695 documents listed, 312 had regions as the first subject descriptor. The 378 references that had the word Arctic in one of their secondary subject descriptors were added: put together, these 690 references constituted the sample of this study. …

Review: The Global Commonwealth of Citizens Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy

THE GLOBAL COMMONWEALTH OF CITIZENS Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy Daniele Archibugi Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 317 pp, US$30.95 cloth ISBN 978-0-691-13490-1We live in an system that is inherently undemocratic. Many of world's organizations - the United Nations, NATO, the financial institutions - are products of a post- World War Two era and no longer reflect 21st- century power realities. And as recent protests in Toronto showed, the G20 - the world's new forum on matters of economic governance - maybe more representative than its predecessor, the G7/8, but it is no better at giving voice the world's most marginalized populations. Indeed, if humanity is address the major global challenges of our time - climate change, poverty, mass human rights violations, pandemics, and war - the forces of globalization wul need be better managed and more inclusive. But how? In his book The Global Commonwealth of Citizens, Daniele Archibugi suggests that the potential for a more just and inclusive order lies in a new approach global governance that connects individuals decisions made at the level, which, as the book's subtitle suggests, is rooted in a approach democratic governance whose authority and legitimacy rest in the collective wul and participation of citizens, the commonwealth.Archibugi envisions the not as it is but as it could be. The book is an ambitious and provocative exercise in futurology, its explicit aim being to inspire the creation of a better (13). In its first half, Archibugi presents his case for cosmopolitan democracy; in the second, he suggests how it could conceivably be applied in practice. So what would a cosmopolitan democracy entau? According Archibugi, there are a number of essential components: The first is citizen control over the use of force, the rationale being that an system that aUows for popular participation is likely be a more peaceful system. The second is the acceptance of cultural diversity, again following the rationale that violent conflict is less likely when minority rights are recognized and respected. The third and fourth involve, respectively, strengthening the self-determination of peoples and monitoring the internal affairs of states. And the fifth calls for participatory management of global problems that aUow for citizen involvement in decision-making (88-89).At its core, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens is about checking power in an system in which might makes right. The cosmopolitan democracy project calls for an end what Archibugi refers as international oligarchism (73), in which states that practice democratic ideals at home are not required do so internationaUy (79). He envisions a global constitutionalism in which the powerful are bound by respect for human rights and the rule of law, which is enforced through supra-national or metagovernment institutions, including an judiciary (98, 119, 129).Whereas the first half of the book is a tight defence of the potential of a liberal order not unlike the European Union, the second half is not nearly as crisp. For example, Archibugi envisions a revitalized UN whose main purpose would be enforce law. This is not an unreasonable proposition. Indeed, efforts strengthen the UN human rights system since the end ofthe Cold War have been designed do exactly that, aiming enforce human rights law either through better monitoring and reporting or through the establishment of an criminal justice system. But he also suggests that the UN might one day establish a world parliamentary made up of elected individuals that would serve as an advisory body the main organs ofthe UN, namely the general assembly and the security council (168-77). …

Review: Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War, and German Unification

MITTERRAND, THE END OF THE COLD WAR, AND GERMAN UNIFICATION Frederic Bozo New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. 417 pp, US$110. 00 hardback ISBN 978-1-84545-427-2As first socialist president of Fifth Republic, Francois Mitterrand, who died after two full terms (14 years) in office undoubtedly deserves to be considered France's most important post-1945 political leader after Charles de Gaulle. From a broader historical perspective, Mitterrand was also an active participant in French political life from 1940s to end ofthe Cold War. He reflected many ofthe idiosyncrasies and ambiguities ofthe period. His participation in Vichy government during war, for example, was at odds with his claim of being an early resistant against Nazi occupation. His reputation as a socialist reformer did not match his centrist economic policies or his anti- Soviet stance during Euromissile crisis ofthe early 1980s. No wonder many considered him to be an enigma, one of his common nicknames being the Sphinx. As such, Mitterrand wul remain a complex and controversial figure despite his personal wish to leave a positive mark on history. One ofthe most scathing criticisms his supporters have to face is Mitterrand badly flubbed his exit from world stage when Berlin waU came down in October 1989. For many researchers, French as weU as foreign, events of 1989-90 caught Mitterrand short. Worse yet, it is often said French diplomacy tried to slow down or even stop German unification. Is this true? Should image of Mitterrand as champion of European integration be replaced by much less flattering picture of a man haunted by past and anxious to avoid rebirth of a unified Germany?Frederic Bozo, professor at University of Paris Ili-Sorbonne NouveUe, where he teaches contemporary history and international relations, and senior research associate at prestigious Institut Francais de Relations Internationales, where he focuses on Atlantic and European security issues, revisits these questions by taking advantage ofthe considerable amount of new material has come available to researchers since early 1990s. Bozo gained extensive access to several important archival resources, namely archives ofthe French presidency, diplomatic archives ofthe Quai d'Orsay, and several personal archives owned by former officials close to president. His stated aim is to offer a scientific investigation that can overcome sterile division between a literature is systematically hostile [to Mitterrand], due either to methodological bias or ulterior motives and works on contrary are committed to defending... Mitterrand' s policies but do not pass test of scholarship (xv). These are, of course, fighting words, and Bozo might best have avoided using them. Belittling most of literature published on an issue before one's own work arrives on scene is not healthy in academic world. Not only does it look selfserving, but it also sets reader's expectations rather high.Does Bozo deliver on his promise? The present reviewer, although not an expert on Mitterrand presidency, would tend to answer in affirmative. This is a painstakingly researched book, clearly structured, methodologically sound, and pleasant to read despite fact it is a translation. …

Assessing UN Sanctions after the Cold War

During the Cold War, the United Nations' role in defending international norms was constrained by U S- Soviet rivalry. On the few occasions when economic sanctions were invoked, they were usually hortatory and relatively weak. With the end ofthe Cold War, UN sanctions initially became more frequent, more likely to be mandated by the security council, and more likely to be broad and painful. After a flurry of comprehensive sanctions, however, concerns were raised about the impact on vulnerable populations within target countries, as well as on neighbouring countries and other trading partners. UN sanctions since the mid-1990s have become both less frequent and narrower, often targeting individuals, and have had more limited economic, and perhaps political, impact.What has been the impact of these shifts on the effectiveness of UN economic sanctions? How is effectiveness measured and how have those assessments changed? The starting point for measuring the effectiveness of sanctions must be the nature ofthe goal sought, but the analysis must also take into account the fact that there are usually secondary objectives and that policymakers' true goals may be hidden behind the public rhetoric. Finally, the potential benefits of sanctions must also be weighed against the political, economic, and social costs of using them, as well as the relative costs and benefits of the other policy tools that are available.1The United Nations was created after World War II with the fundamental goal of promoting the collective security of its members, but its reach was limited to lesser disputes from the beginning because of US-Soviet differences.2 Over the years, and long before the Cold War ended, the United Nations also sought to uphold norms related to human rights within countries. As noted by eminent sanctions scholar Margaret Doxey:[N]ew rationales for sanctions have been provided by the development of new international norms in the second half of the twentieth century which go beyond respect for territorial integrity and political independence to encompass self-determination in colonial situations, racial equality, and a broad spectrum of human rights, including the right to democratic systems of government. If 'just sanctions' - like 'just war' - are the international community's justified response to norm-violation, a wide range of external and internal policies may how be judged to merit such a response.3Thus, one measure of UN sanctions that distinguishes them from other sanctions is the responsibility to ensure that they are just. While not entirely absent during the Cold War, concerns about the impact on individuals were raised to a new level by the humanitarian consequences of comprehensive sanctions, first against Iraq following the first Gulf War and then against Haiti in response to the overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Thus, most UN sanctions now have more than one explicit goal-to stem conflict or uphold international norms, and to do so without harming innocent civilians. But the response - targeted travel or financial sanctions against individuals - has raised other human rights issues that are just beginning to be addressed.4TRADITIONAL APPROACHES TO ASSESSING SANCTIONS EFFECTIVENESSThe effectiveness of any policy tool can only be measured against the goals it is intended to achieve, as well as the costs involved in achieving them. While each case has one or more stated goals specific to that case, such as ending or mitigating conflict, promoting human rights or democracy, or discouraging the spread of weapons of mass destruction, operational objectives fall into three broad and overlapping categories - to signal disapproval, to deny or contain, or to coerce. Different types of sanctions are likely to be relatively more appropriate for some categories than others:* to signal disapproval, punish, or deter: hortatory sanctions that members are exhorted but not required to impose; and travel, financial, or property sanctions targeted at individuals. …

Review: Warming up to the Cold War

WARMING UP TO THE COLD WAR Canada and the United States' Coalition ofthe Willing, from Hiroshima to Korea Robert Teigrob Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. 288pp, $55.00 cloth ISBN 978-0-8020-9923-5Robert Teigrob' s is hardly the first book-length study of Canadian politics and foreign relations in the early years ofthe Cold War. The milestones he cites are familiar: Igor Gouzenko's defection and subsequent revelations about Soviet atomic espionage, the formation of NATO, and the Korean War. So is his preoccupation with the shift in Canadian attitudes, from expectations of great-power harmony under UN auspices to acceptance of American leadership in a bipolar world. Teigrob examines both the making of Canadian foreign policy and the domestic impact of anti- Communism, and promises a fresh combination of diplomatic and cultural history.But he largely misses the opportunity to advance a genuinely new interpretation of the period. His present-mindedness, which the book's subtitle evinces, is one reason why. In Teigrob's account, the creation of NATO and the UN-authorized police action in Korea were exercises in American unilateralism, much like the invasion of Iraq. In 1950 as in 2003, he argues, the preservation of Canadian national sovereignty required abstention rather than participation. But regardless of whether one agrees with his recommendations in each case, the analogy between Korea and Iraq is misleading.Teigrob's is a variation on the argument that Donald Creighton and George Grant advanced. Like them, he holds successive Liberal governments culpable of betraying Canadian independence by military alliance and economic integration with the United States. His additions to the original argument, including a wider apportioning of blame, hardly strengthen his case. He places less emphasis on direct American pressure than did Creighton or Grant, and suggests that the Canadian public - which, under the influence of American media and their Canadian auxiliaries, cloned America's Cold War consensus, albeit for homegrown reasons - was an accomplice rather than a victim. Public sentiment forced the government of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent to follow American preferences more closely than ministers themselves wished, Teigrob concludes, culminating in the decision to send ground troops to Korea.Teigrob replaces the mock- Augustan cadences of Creighton and Grant with the jargon of cultural studies. Corporate media systematically smother social divisions in the interests of the ruling classes, he explains. American mass culture's dominance of the Canadian market, and American assumptions of ideological harmony across the 49th parallel, made official cultural diplomacy superfluous. Washington could rely on lime Magazine to provide the indoctrination that the American government had to furnish on its own elsewhere.A systematic study of the American media's effects on postwar Canadian opinion might be worthwhile, but would require extensive data on circulation, readership, market share, and editorial orientation. Teigrob opts instead for an impressionistic approach in which the representativeness (or otherwise) of an article is more often asserted than proven, with the nuances of individual editorials over-interpreted as if they were painstaking efforts to promote an official line, not immediate responses to daily events.Teigrob' s second modification of Creighton and Grant is chronological. He dates the great betrayal to the period between 1945 and 1950, not the Second World War. The nationalist revolt against American hegemony first became evident in objections to the direction of the Korean War. Subsequent disagreements over nuclear arms and Vietnam, Teigrob claims, intensified Canada's desire to escape American tutelage, but did not, as others claim, create it. He emphasizes the British connection's centrality to the traditional Canadian self-definition, with America the necessary foil, noting the coolness of many Anglo-Canadians to American anti-colonialism until Washington grew tolerant of empire as a bulwark against communism. …

Review: Growing Apart? America and Europe in the Twenty-First Century

GROWING APART? AMERICA AND EUROPE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Jeffrey Kopstein and Sven Steinmo, editors Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xiv, 237PP, US$24.99 paper ISBN 978-0-521-70491-5How much America and its friends and allies in Europe have in common? And regardless of how that first question is to be answered, can it be said that those trends that separate them - culturally, economically, even militarily - are growing more pronounced? Are the two sides of the transatlantic relationship showing evidence of divergence in this first decade of the 21st century? In pursuit of answers to these and other questions of relevance to US-European relations, editors Jeffrey Kopstein, of the University of Toronto, and Sven Steinmo, of the European University Institute in Florence, have assembled a top-notch team of scholars drawn from a variety of disciplines, who turn out - not surprisingly - to have a variety of ways of addressing the query posed in the book's title.It is far from a novel undertaking, this business of trying to detect evidence of a widening ofthe Atlantic: many scholars and policy analysts applied themselves regularly to the task even during the decades ofthe Cold War. During those long decades, and notwithstanding that they faced a common Soviet foe, it seemed to more than a few observers that the Western allies must eventually succumb to the forces of divisi venes s, so that although one might have thought convergence should have been in all of their interests, its evil twin, divergence, always managed to lurk just around the corner. And should we take the longer view, and contemplate the state of transatlantic comity prior to America's becoming very much a European strategic entity during and following the Second War, then it is obvious that discussions between Americans and Europeans could and did easily, and regularly, degenerate into what Antonello Gerbi so suggestively labelled the of the New World - a dispute in which, or so it seemed to this Italian intellectual upon arriving in Paris in 1938, comparisons were compulsively being drawn between a debased New and a virtuous Old one (!), with the leitmotif being the inferiority of American civilization when contrasted with that of Europe.What the disappearance ofthe Soviet threat did was to tilt the tables once again more sharply in favour ofthe divergence thesis, and during the George W Bush years it was not uncommon to hear the strains of the familiar polemics that had so characterized the earlier dispute ofthe New World. It is precisely with the Bush administration as the backdrop that this set of chapters saw the light of day, as a result of a pair of meetings, first in Colorado, then in Toronto, held around the midpoint of the second Bush term. Obviously, none of the contributors could have foreseen the rise to power of the very Euro-friendly Barack Obama at the time they were meeting, and it might be tempting simply to say of this collection that it has been victimized by timing, as its problematique vanished virtually overnight a result of the November 2008 American election. What else might one conclude, when the most recent Pew survey, released in July 2009, shows Europeans - including and especially those living in France and Germany, the countries that made up the much-maligned axis of weasels during the Iraq crisis of 2003 - to be convinced by overwhelming majorities that they can trust the American president to do the right thing? To conclude thus, however, would be wrong, and this for a couple of reasons.First, and somewhat surprisingly, one could claim, based on the most recent elections for the European parliament, that in fact the two sides of the Atlantic remain on the path of divergence - save that this time it might be argued that it is the Europeans who comprise the retrograde element, choosing as they did in June 2009 to send to their legislative assembly in Strasbourg what some have termed the angry bloc, a large and motley crew of right-wing misfits and malcontents whose counterparts in America are generally confined to the sidelines of AM radio talk shows, and not welcomed into the corridors of power - at the taxpayers' expense, no less. …

Sixty Years of Foreign Aid

Foreign aid as we know it - the transfer of concessional resources from one government to another government, nongovernmental organization, or international organization, one purpose of which is to promote long-term beneficial change, including poverty reduction, in the recipient country - is something relatively new in relations between states. Apart from several cases of short-term international relief during the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, foreign economic assistance really began in the wake of World War II with US aid to Greece and Turkey and, shortly thereafter, the Marshall plan for economic recovery in Europe. By 1965, most well-off, industrialized had aid programs of their own and the World Bank and other international organizations were managing sizeable aid transfers. The number of public aid donors increased even more with the entry in the 1970s ofthe petroleum-producing states. More recently, the former socialist bloc have restarted aid programs that they had dropped at the end ofthe Cold War. Those acceding to the European Union are required to have aid programs. And a number of countries are now aid donors, the largest of which is China. India is also increasingly getting in to the aidgiving business and Korea, Turkey, Thailand, and other, smaller have become small but active donors as well.These many efforts over 60 years have involved several trillion dollars in assistance. What have we learned from all this effort? I will divide my answer into two sections: answers with regard to the impact and effectiveness of aid, and answers involving the motives and activities of those governments providing the aid. I will conclude with a peek into the probable future of aidgiving.AID'S IMPACTThe debate on aid's effectiveness and impact has been long and inconclusive. It continues today between what I shall call the resource fundamentalists those who believe that more aid will spur development - and the market fundamentalists who are skeptical that foreign aid has yet, or can in the future be expected, to solve the development problem. Behind this argument, whose prominent proponents today include Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University (in favour of more aid) and William Easterly of New York University (in favour of more markets), lies a basic disagreement about the role ofthe state in the economy. One side sees the state (and public aid resources) as a critical element in promoting development; the other regards the state as an obstacle to economic progress insofar as it meddles in the functioning of markets. The real lessons from threescore years of aid for development are more complex.Well-functioning markets are important to development but so are wellfunctioning statesInvestment, growth, and poverty reduction require either incentives for individual agents to expand production or, as in the case ofthe Soviet Union for a period, the forced extraction of resources from producers and their investment in the means of production. Governments of poor have often extracted resources from their populaces but have lacked the capacity or will to invest them in productive enterprises. The socialist experiments in developing have mostly been failures. Where governments have tried to control or own the means of production and trade, they have tended to divert resources from productive purposes into political coffers or into their own pockets, ultimately suppressing incentives for farmers to produce and investors to create productive enterprises. This is the major lesson of the failure of development in much of sub-Saharan Africa during the last quarter of the 20th century. This does not mean that all government intervention in poor has been a failure. Capable and effective states like Korea, Taiwan, Botswana, and, above all, China, have by a variety of means led development in their but have also left considerable scope for private agents to make the decisions that have produced investment and growth in their countries. …

Robert E. Osgood and the Origins of Social International Relations Theory

Perhaps the most significant trend in international relations theory in the last two decades has been the emergence of approaches emphasizing social, cultural, and ideational factors into the foreground ofthe field. What various authors have termed the sociological, cultural, or constructivist turn in IR theory was a direct result ofthe discipline's need to address the causes and consequences ofthe end ofthe Cold War and collapse ofthe Soviet Union, events that had been largely unforeseen by IR theorists operating within the structural-materialist paradigm of neorealism that had dominated the in earlier decades.' The emergence of constructivism as a body of theory offered an alternative to this previous orientation, one that promised to account for the significance of cultural and sociocognitive factors as they affected state foreign policies and the nature of the international system.While these were regarded as radically new perspectives on international politics in the post-Cold War era, however, this article will contend that these constructivist authors owe much to Robert E. Osgood, whose arguments about the history of US foreign policy decades earlier suggested many of the same conclusions.REALISM AND THE HI STORY OF US FOREIGN POLICY: ROBERT OSGOOD'S CRITIQUEMore than 50 years after its publication, Osgood's 1953 work Ideals and Selfinterest in America's Foreign Relations continues to be a seminal analysis of the evolution of US foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century. It was an attempt to chronicle what had clearly been a major evolution in American foreign relations since the late 1800s, to illustrate the sources of America's conduct in that period, and to prescribe a course for future policy based on the application of power in the pursuit of both moral and pragmatic ends.2Osgood suggested a pattern by which change had occurred in the first half of the 20th century in US foreign policy. He argued that paradigmatic understandings of the nation's proper role in the world come to hold sway for long periods, based on their ability to describe a coherent and believable view of the world more adequately than competing conceptions. As a result, American foreign policy had been marked by long periods of consensus, punctuated by periods of redefinition, which occur when established beliefs no longer seem effective in explaining and dealing with the international environment. Osgood argued that the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, were characterized by varying degrees of general reluctance on the part of Americans to play an active part in international security affairs. This was a result of the fact that a consensus was reached, among American leaders and the nation as a whole, that non-interventionism was the most appropriate role for the United States in the world, based on traditional ideals and revisionist arguments that the nation had been duped into fighting an old world power-political conflict in World War I. Osgood claimed that while US interests remained consistent throughout this process, they were properly perceived or ignored to greater or lesser degrees by the dominant consensus of each era.Osgood described American foreign policy in the early 20th century as dominated by the excessive idealism ofthe American people and most US leaders alike. Woodrow Wilson was his archetypal example. While Wilson's moralism allowed the nation to bring to bear its inchoate power in the First World War, it also created unrealizable expectations in the minds of Americans, and the inevitable result was disillusionment and ultimately a withdrawal to neo-isolationism in the war's aftermath. Osgood claimed that it was only through the discipline of adversity forced on the United States by World War II that a more mature understanding ofthe need for longterm, patient, and moderate involvement in an international system dominated by the exercise of national power took root firmly in the American psyche. …

Back to the Future?

This article evaluates different theoretical frameworks for understanding both the nature ofthe NATO alliance and the evolution of NATO- Russia relations since the end of the Cold War. It argues that the evolution of relations between the alliance and Moscow is best accounted for by the realist analytical perspective, while liberal and social-constructivist perspectives fail to capture the most important aspects of the alliance. Despite the establishment ofthe NATO-Russia Council in 2002, a balance-of-power logic, dictated by an international system that has remained to a large extent anarchical, continues to shape relations between the alliance and Moscow. The article proceeds in four sections. It begins with a short summary of NATO-Russia relations since the end ofthe Cold War. It then lays out the main theoretical frameworks that have been used to explain relations between the alliance and Moscow: liberal, social-constructivist, and realist ideas about - and prescriptions for - NATO-Russia relations. The next section applies all sets of perspectives to the record of key post-Cold War NATO -Russia relations. The article concludes with a section explaining why realism is the strongest explanatory paradigm.NATO-RUSSIA RELATIONS DURING THE 1990SAlthough during the Cold War, and particularly in the period of detente, NATO had shown it could adapt to the evolution of east-west relations, the collapse of the USSR in December 199 1 marked the beginning of a new and uncertain phase in the alliance's history. Many scholars and decision-makers alike saw in the disappearance of the original catalyzing threat, which had led to west European calls for a US defence commitment to Europe in 1947, the risk that the alliance might soon become obsolete - unless its members were able to craft a new role for NATO. While the failed Soviet conservatives' coup in August 199 1 served as a warning that NATO's original purpose could not be completely disposed of, western leaders were swift to recognize the need for a rapid update in this institution's role. The declaration on a transformed North Atlantic Alliance that was adopted by the North Atlantic Council in London in July 1990, while reaffirming the basic principles on which the alliance rested, also identified a first set of initiatives aimed at reforming NATO's role in post- Cold War Europe. At its Rome summit in November 1991, the alliance adopted a new strategic concept in which, alongside restating the defence dimension, prominence was also given to economic, social, and environmental issues. In addition, the new strategic concept envisioned a peacekeeping role for NATO outside the borders of its member countries. These changes reflected a consciousness that, unless the alliance was willing to reform, it risked drifting towards gradual irrelevance and marginalization.1The efforts to revitalize the alliance and assert its relevance in the postCold War international system also kicked offa new phase in relations with Moscow. After the end of the Cold War, Russian decision-makers expected NATO somehow to atrophy and championed the emergence of a new European security structure; at the same time, however, they did not reject the alliance's offer of cooperation and declared their identification and wish to align with the west. After the establishment in December 199 1 of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council to discuss issues of common concern between NATO and former Soviet bloc states, Moscow joined the newly launched Partnership for Peace program in June 1994. However, the Kremlin insisted that Russia would not let itself be treated as a country on a par with other nonmembers of the alliance, but required an arrangement that was qualitatively different from those offered to other former Soviet bloc states. Following the alliance's intervention in the Balkans and the signing of the Dayton peace agreement in November 1995, Russian troops participated in the implementation and stabilization forces that were deployed in BosniaHerzegovina with the aim of supervising the application of the agreement, and in May 1997 Russia entered the Euro- Atlantic Partnership Council. …

Review: States, Nations and the Great Powers

STATES, NATIONS AND THE GREAT POWERS: The Sources of Regional War and Peace Benjamin Miller Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 5????, US$39.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-521-69161-1)The end ofthe Cold War and the emergence of a unipolar world took almost all theorists in international relations by surprise. Before the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union disintegrated, there was a widespread presumption that, for better or worse, bipolarity would prove to be an enduring structure of international politics. Although there were realists as well as liberals who were optimistic that the more divisive aspects of bipolarity could be overcome, few predicted that the task of managing a bipolar world would come to such an abrupt and peaceful conclusion. The sudden and almost complete collapse of communism was greeted by liberals with unbound enthusiasm and this putative end of history was accompanied by talk of a new world order and the emergence of an expanding zone of peace that would, over time, extend into the peripheral zone of war. Realists urged caution; some even argued that we would soon experience some regret for the passing of bipolarity and most insisted, at least initially, that unipolarity would not persist for any length of time. In fact, the new world order never materialized and unipolarity has proved to be remarkably resilient and so theorists of all colours have had to do some serious rethinking.Four very significant developments have emerged from the reassessments that have taken place in recent years. First, it is now regularly acknowledged that it is not possible to make sense of world politics simply from a global perspective and that it is essential to accommodate a regional perspective. In Regions and Powers, Buzan and Wsever (2003), for example, reassess global security in terms of regional security complexes and in A World of Regions, Katzenstein (2005) looks at Asia and Europe in the context of what he calls the American Imperium. Second, there has been a growing recognition that research must incorporate both domestic and international levels of analysis. Third, it is argued that we must endeavour to find ways of integrating the insights of divergent paradigms, as Katzenstein and Sil advocate in their forthcoming edited book Analytical Eclecticism (2009). Finally, there is a growing insistence that we need to operate on a broader historical canvas.In this major contribution to the literature on war and peace, Miller demonstrates the enormous dividends that can be reaped by taking all four of these developments into account. Too often, the literature in this area concentrates on a global perspective and so Miller's crucial first move is to acknowledge the centrality of regions in any attempt to understand the complex patterns of war and peace that have developed in world politics across time. He then establishes a theoretical framework that recognizes the importance of taking account of both liberal and realist insights and in the process accommodating variables that are identified at both the global and the domestic level. …

Comment on Gray

34 Historically Speaking January/February 2006 flux. Violence, to offer one example, he described as a "pulsation" (Pulsieren) rather than a constant.6 In any case, ifwar's common elements were constants, the zealots would be justified in canceling them out oftheir formulae for success, as indeed they try to do now. I suspect Gray would agree with this portrayal ofthe nature of war. My concern, however , is not with his interpretation, but how it might be received by those who lack his breadth and depth of knowledge. His argument can be taken as claiming that all one needs to know about the nature of the weather , for instance, is that it consists of a few common and inescapable elements, such as barometric pressure, heat index, dew point, wind velocity, and so on. This line of reasoning does not allow us to appreciate that there is indeed a qualitative difference between a rain shower and a hurricane—so much so in fact that we might do well to consider them two entirely different types of weather and prepare ourselves accordingly. We ought, therefore, to recognize not only the elements common to all forms ofweather, but also how those elements relate to each other, and how changes in one or more of them will affect how we should prepare ourselves before stepping outdoors. After all this, I think Gray and I are largely in agreement, except ofcourse on those niggling details. Antulio J. Echevarría II is the Director of Research andDirector ofNational Security Affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute, U. S . Army War College. He is the author o/After Clausewitz: German Military Thinkers before the Great War (University Press ofKansas, 2001), and is currently working on two books, one that examines Clausewitz 's On War as an "unfinished symphony " and one that compares amateur andprofessional military views offuture war in the West before 1914. 1 See, for example, the U.S. National Intelligence Council, Mapping the Global Future (National Intelligence Council, December 2004). 2 Antulio J. Echevarría II, "The Trouble with History in Military Education," Historically Speaking: The Bulletin ofthe Historical Society (September/October 2005): 11-15. 3 Vom Kriege, Book I, Ch. 2, 214.·* Vom Kriege, Book I, Ch. 1, 212-13. 5 Vom Kriege, Book VIII, Ch. 3B, 970-74. 6 Vom Kriege, Book I, Ch. 2, 210. Comment on Gray Andrew J. Bacevich I concur with Colin Gray. Indeed, I am almost tempted to say that I agree with every jot and tittle of his essay and to leave it at that. Almost, but not quite. Gray expects others to find his essay "shocking" and "unfashionable" and "controversial ." He should prepare to be disappointed . Serious students of war will judge his views to be commonsensical and even conventional . There is not a lot new here. Simplifying only slightly, Gray's argument reduces to a single sentence: "Clausewitz got it about right." Indeed, he did, especially in fixing the relationship of war to politics. The ugly truth is that as long as politics persists so too will large-scale, politically motivated violence. That the innocent, the naive, and the idealistic will bridle at that prospect is to be expected. As with those who rail against the market or deny the existence of Original Sin, theirs is an exercise in futility. To be sure, those opposing all war as a matter of principle serve a useful purpose: they make it harder for ambitious or bloodthirsty politicians to portray the conflict lurking over the horizon as high-minded, moral, and unavoidable. So two cheers for those who protest and demonstrate and proclaim "hell no, we won't go." Yet no amount of emoting for peace, however well intentioned, will succeed in making an end to war. Gray puzzles over the fact that some of those actually in the war business fall prey to their own peculiar version of romanticism. The counterparts to the pacifists denying the utility of war are the visionaries—soldiers as well as strategists—who entertain dreams of perfecting war, liberating it from Clausewitzian risk and uncertainty. Since the end ofthe Cold War, Americans have shown a particular susceptibility to such fantasies. Theorists have developed...

Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963 (review)

3001CN0TES Spivak's planetarity, on the other hand, shares at least one salient quality with the Old Comparative Literature that she professes to reject: its centripetal and selfconscious sense of being a traditional force preserving borders—its own and its texts'—from the onslaught of globalization's coercive sameness. Comparative literature turns out to be not so easily cleaved from its nationalist origins. Thus does Spivak's "planetarity" deconstruct itself, for in order to preserve its own disciplinary borders from the apocalypse ofa globalized world literature in English, comparative literature finds itselfretreating into an argument for difference that willy-nilly preserves national identities in one form or another. Whither nationalism? Here it finds itselfreinscribed, albeit in a subtler, more "planetary" form, as Spivak circles the wagons against both English and the global. Despite Spivak's cogent and necessary arguments for comparative literature as a corrective supplement to "the apparitions ofCultural and Ethnic Studies" (70) and the facile generalizations ofmuch ofpostcolonial studies, it is perhaps unavoidable that her concluding attempt at an expansive gesture undermines itself. As Spivak stands in the place and name ofthe man who once called for comparative literature to act as "a preserver and creator ofthe highest values ofmankind" (Wellek 295), she can muster only a fuzzy, ambivalent move towards telepoiesis: In this era ofglobal capital triumphant, to keep responsibility alive in the reading and teaching of the textual is at first sight impractical. It is, however, the right ofthe textual to be so responsible, responsive, answerable . The "planet" is here, as perhaps always, a catachresis for inscribing collective responsibility as right. Its alterity, determining experience, is mysterious and discontinuous—an experience ofthe impossible. It is such collectivities that must be opened up with the question "How many are we?" when cultural origin is detranscendentalized into fiction—the toughest task in the diaspora. (101-2) This final gesture ofSpivak's Wellek Lectures confirms one last time the recurring structure of comparative literature's brave, doomed stand against the apocalypse, which neverturns out to be quite final—yet anothermessage in a bottle, sent offto "a future reader" (93), to be read and reenacted, again and again. Alfred López77ie UniversityofMississippi BOOKNOTES KATE A. BALDWIN. Beyondthe ColorLine andtheIron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. xii + 346 pp. The period referred to in the second title ofKate Baldwin's significant and highly readable work is in and ofitselfindicative ofthe historical shifts in politics, race relations, and the place ofthe intelligentsia in Russia and the US during the first half ofthe twentieth century. For Russia, this period covers the very early days of an emerging Soviet Union through the beginnings ofthe Cold War and the controversial reforms ofNikita Khrushchev, while the US at that time moves from the era of the speakeasy to the Civil Rights Movement. In the interim both countries will Vole 28 (2004): 162 THE COMPAKATIST endure the Second World War and crises ofidentity for large portions ofthe population while minority (i.e., non-white) peoples struggle with social, political, and economic inequities imbedded in each respective country. Baldwin deftly weaves her argument and commentary around the lives and works offour brilliant AfricanAmericans who all crossed both the color line and the Iron Curtain to have an impact in Russia and the Soviet Union as well as in the US. Baldwin's choice ofClaude McKay, Längsten Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson allows her to comment simultaneously on the international import of race and society as well as to trace the Civil Rights history ofthe American Left and its place in the creation ofScviet propaganda at home and in the West. Her choice oftexts for these writers and thinkers is excellent—drawing from both High Culture and popular cultural artifacts—as she eschews the best known and most discussed works in favor oflesser known and more revealing treatises and essays published during and after the writers' visits abroad and to Russia. She does well to use the experience ofeach in another country to contextualize the writers' attitude toward race, politics, and society abroad. She does less well, however, in relating the same attitudinal mix to the US...

A BRAVE NEW SOUTH AFRICAN DEFENCE INDUSTRY?

Extracted from text ... Little research has been done on the state of the South African defence industry since 1994. From an industry perspective, two related factors served it with a virtual death sentence in the late 1980s. The first factor was the end of the Cold War which left the world with considerably more capacity and capability to develop and produce arms than it needed or could afford. The second factor was the end of Apartheid in South Africa and the concomitant decline in the National Party government's need for an independent arms industry. In the 1990s, the industry therefore not only ..

Globalization and the future of humanitarian action. New priorities for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement?

We are all aware that we are passing through a phase characterized by rapid changes involving concepts that transcend cultures and utilize mechanisms that some societies may be unable to understand. Since the end of the Cold War, which had troubled international relations for more than fifty years, the parameters of contemporary international relations have evolved within the framework of the concept of globalization. I do not think that anyone questions the political, economic, social or cultural impact of globalization. The present differences of opinion concern assessment of the extent of the adverse consequences of this impact on human society, and especially on communities in the Third World, many of which are still living in backward conditions.

Characteristics of Astronomy-Related Organizations

Geographical distributions, ages and sizes of astronomy-relatedorganizations have been investigated from comprehensive and up-to-datesamples extracted from the master files for StarGuides/StarWorlds.Results for professional institutions, associations, planetariums, andpublic observatories are commented, as well as specific distributions forastronomy-related publishers and commercial-software producers.The highly uneven general pattern displayed by geographical distributionsis still very much the same as it was at the beginning of the XXthcentury, even if the densities are higher – another illustration of thewell-known socio-economic effect of self-reinforcement. Othergeographical peculiarities (local concentrations, national cultures andpolicies, electronic astronomy,...) are discussed in the paper, aswell as the uneasy separation between amateur and professional astronomersin associations.Some events had a clear impact on the rate of foundation ofastronomy-related organizations, such as World Wars I and II, thebeginning of space exploration, the landing of man on the Moon, the end ofthe Cold War, spectacular comets, and so on. However, as detailed in thepaper, not all of them affected in the same way Western Europe and NorthAmerica, nor the various types of organizations.The size of the vast majority of astronomy-related organizations isrelatively small, with again some differences between Western Europe andNorth America.

Introduction — Narrative Practices in the Post-Cold War Transition: Cultural and Narratological Transformations

??? COHPAnATIST INTRODUCTION — NARRATIVE PRACTICES IN THE POST-COLD WAR TRANSITION: CULTURAL AND NARRATOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATIONS Marcel Cornis-Pope /TJAe imagination has now acquireda singular newpower in social lifo. The imagination - expressed in dreams, songs, fantasies, myths, and stories —has always been part of the repertoire, in some culturally organized way, ofevery society. But there is a peculiar newforce to tlie imagination in social life today. Morepersons in more parts ofthe world consider a wider set of"possible" lives than they ever did before. Arjun Appadurai,"Global Ethnoscapes" (197) In his 1988 reappraisal of "Self-Reflexive Fiction," Raymond Federman ascribed to innovative fiction a strong reformulative function in recent history, enhancing the critical dialogue between individual and culture through "self-consciousness," which draws the reader into the workings ofthe text and its cultural environment, and "self-referentiaUty," which pits the author's consciousness against the rhetoric of his text (29). In both versions, narrative reflexivity is much more than a formal gimmick: its function is to extricate the novel "from the postures and impostures" (21) of the Cold War, committing fiction to a poetics of "divergence" (18). This poetics of divergence—we could add from our post-1989 vantage point—has contributed significantly to the breakup ofthe Cold War mentalities : freeing the social imaginary from the competing grand narratives ofideology and their annihUating totaUstic images (the Rocket, the Bomb, the Ideological Empire, the Nuclear Holocaust, the Dead Zone), and replacing monologic concepts ofculture with polysystemic views that retrieve the voices of süenced others. If, as Mary Louise Pratt has contended , the current geopoUtical scene is a "hospitable space for the cultivation of multilinguaUsm, polyglossia, the arts of cultural mediation, deep intercultural understanding, and genuinely global consciousness" (62), it is also because of the revisionistic strategies of postmodernism which have encouraged alternative "voices" and codifications in a culture 's narratives. Postmodernism has been described as "the corrosive cultural movement when suspicion of master narratives becomes widespread and the margins soUcit the matrix," valorizing the experience ofthe formerly subaltern groups (Leitch ix). As Vincent B. Leitch explains: To conceptualize culture from the vantage point of social margins is to foreground violent omissions, repressions, and contingencies oftraditional reason, representation, knowledge, and high culture. Put in other terms, postmodern cultural analysis characteristically entails an ethicopolitics of VcH. 23 (1999): 111 NARRATIVE IN THE POST-COLO WAR TRANSITION inclusiveness, multiculturalism, polylogue, social transformations, antiauthoritarianism , and decentralization. (133) The type of "multicultural," polysystemic fiction that has emerged since the early 1970s rides cultural boundaries between center and periphery, dominant and subordinated group, redefining US cultural production as hybrid, a mixture ofcontinuaUy changing subcultures. It also challenges generic boundaries between criticism and fiction, frame and story, and voice and writing, hybridizing and compUcating the noveUstic form with multiple narrators, polymorphous characters, and alternative stories. Offering itself as a semiotic "borderland" where "two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different cultures occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle, and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy" (Anzaldúa, Preface to Borderland), multicultural fiction mediates historical, cultural, and psychological otherness. Postmodern theories and practices have also played a catalytic role in the political emancipation of the Soviet block, empowering East European Uterary and cultural criticism with the tools that have aUowed it to assume a reconstructive function, encouraging innovation and normbreaking. As I have argued elsewhere ("Critical Theory" 131-56; The Unfinished Battles 7-58), the Glasnost phenomenon can be regarded as a product of an increased cultural-phUosophic dialogue across the ideological divide between the Soviet block and the West. The postmodern grafts have been useful to a number of intellectual and artistic groups in Eastern Europe involved in articulating an alternative model ofinteUectual interaction that is tolerant, pluraUstic, reformulative. By comparing and interfacing cultures, this postcommunist/post-Cold War consciousness has recovered and consolidated that middle ground between Eastern and Western, dominant and peripheral, that was overlooked by the previously polarized world-view. That middle ground can be found in many places: in the reemergence of Central Europe, in diasporic or hybrid Uteratures, and in multicultural or postcolonial identities. However fragüe, these in-between areas are being continuaUy...

Neither Fire nor Ice: Postmodern Revisions of America's Post-Cold War Apocalyptic Nightmare

On March 6, 1990, The Bulletin ofAtomic Scientists set back its famous Doomsday Clock, signifying, for the first time in many years, that we had moved away from, rather than closer to, the horrors of a nuclear midnight. Just as this long-awaited adjustment of the clock signaled the brighter dawn of a post-Cold War world, so too did it offer mute testimony to the pervasive presence ofmetaphoric imagery in the discourses ofArmageddon. However, as the fears ofnuclear annihuation diminish, so does the cultural dominance of the imagery with which it was associated, thereby making room for new, post-Cold War anxieties and iconographies. Indeed, much ofthe imagery with which these new neuroses are now routinely associated made its debut during the last decades of East-West atomic anxiety. Consequently, many ofthe narratives that first explored and exploited these now-contemporary concerns and images are not recent works, nor postmodernist per se. However, they are informed by similar sensitivities to the uncertainty, incoherence, and incipient chaos that problematizes contemporary attempts to retotalize our cultural and cognitive realities. Towards a Typology ofNew Armageddons In the wake ofthe Cold War, the thoroughly depopulated cities ofStanley Kramer's On the Beach (1959), along with Arch Oboler's Five (1951), Ranald MacDougall's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), and Mick Jackson's Threads (1984), have become increasingly anachronistic previsions, fading along with the memory ofthe Soviet Union, its rapidly deteriorating strategic arsenal, and the hair-trigger anxieties ofa world eternaUy poised on the brink ofseU-immolation. Ofcourse, the image of the bomb has not entirely left us, but it has undergone a change in social valence. Nuclear weapons are now increasingly associated with terrorist activity, thereby engendering a narrative trend in which the atomic bomb is no longer represented as a globe-smashing behemoth, but as a backpack-sized expression of radical—or Third World—wrath and vengeance. However, even as the scope and danger ofnuclear weapons shrink, new technologies of mass-destruction loom large in our immediate future. The toxic terrorism conducted in Japanese subways is only a minuscule precursor ofgreater dangers, according to a swelling tide oftexts obsessed with biological and ecological catastrophes. New images have begun evolving to replace the old mushroom-cloud specter of nuclear decimation. We are now invited, often urged, to refocus our fears upon

Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War by Hugh Gusterson

technology and culture Book Reviews 133 Attention very much centers on his policy concerns and their expres­ sion. This may reflect the book’s origin. In 1983 Francis X. Gannon began the project as a set ofessays on the retired congressman’s nuclear energy views. It evolved into a socalled authorized biography supported by a group ofclose associates and friends organized as the Holifield Book Associates. When Gan­ non suffered a fatal heart attack in late 1988, the associates sought a successor and found Richard W. Dyke. In 1989 Dyke published his dissertation as Mr. AtomicEnergy: Congressman Chet Holifield andAtomic Energy Affairs, 1945-1974 (Greenwood Press) and early the following year accepted the new commission. Finally published in 1996, Chet Holifield retains marks of its original purpose, part testimonial and still mostly a series of essays on various topics related to Holifield’s congressional views and positions. Considering the book an essay collection rather than a biography shifts the basis forjudgment without much changing the final grade. Some of its shortcomings are relatively minor, but others are more serious. Such lapses as “profuse time” (p. xiv), “credible and au­ thoritarian sources” (p. xvii), or “Cold War Warrior” (p. 74), for instance, may be merely amusing or annoying, but infelicity of lan­ guage verges on downright error in a sentence like: “Human beings receiving high levels of exposure could and did experience serious biological mutations” (p. 159) Interviews form the book’s backbone, fleshed out with research in manuscript collections; reference to published literature later than the 1980s appears very limited. Anec­ dote, mostly bland if not pointless, largely seems to displace analysis, with scarcely a hint that Holifield might ever have displayed flaws ofjudgment or character. Although uncritical and relentlessly com­ mitted to Holifield’s viewpoint, the discussion of individual topics, most of them on matters nuclear, may nonetheless reward the care­ ful reader with some useful details. Barton C. Hacker Dr. Hacker is the author of Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing, 1947-1974 (University of California Press, 1994) and other prizewinning history and fiction. Since 1992 he has been associated with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as historian and editor. NuclearRites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End ofthe Cold War. By Hugh Gusterson. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. xviii+351; illustrations, notes, bibliography, in­ dex. $39.95 (cloth). Hugh Gusterson’s Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War represents an important attempt by an anthropologist to understand the worldview of nuclear weapons scientists and anti­ 134 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE nuclear activists. Drawn to nuclear weapons production systems first as an antinuclear activist, Gusterson became fascinated with the question of how nuclear weapons designers maintain an image of themselves as good scientists and conscientious citizens while work­ ing on weapons of mass destruction. For historians of technology, Gusterson adds to our understand­ ing of the people who design technologies of mass destruction. In­ stead ofopening the black box ofthe weapons themselves, as Donald MacKenzie skillfully has done in his Inventing Accuracy, Gusterson examines the political and ethicaljustifications of the scientists, nu­ clear testing as a cultural ritual, and policy implications of this cul­ ture. This means that the book is short on the technical details that have filled many other official and technological accounts ofnuclear weapons design. However, it brings the people and institutions of the nuclear weapons complex into the foreground, something that few histories or sociological accounts of nuclear weapons have done successfully. The bulk of the book focuses on weapons scientists. As a preface to his analysis of the scientists, Gusterson presents a political history of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and of the eco­ nomic significance of the nuclear weapons industry for the city of Livermore, California. He then goes on to describe richly the texture of work life at the laboratory, from the secrecy that characterizes working at a site such as Livermore, to the socialization of newly hired scientists, to the ritual of nuclear testing, which celebrates and defines the elite community of weapons designers. In writing aboutweapons scientists, Gusterson strives to avoid...