A reprint of the Harvard U. Press edition of 1977, this book analyzes one element in American cold war decision making military advice and influence on the use of force and considers how the proportion of military influence, relative to that of civilian advisers, has varied since WWII. Includes a ne

Even fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, it is still hard to grasp that we no longer live under its immense specter. For nearly half a century, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, all world events hung in the balance of a simmering dispute between two of the greatest military powers in history. Hundreds of millions of people held their collective breath as the United States and the Soviet Union, two national ideological entities, waged proxy wars to determine spheres of influence–and millions of others perished in places like Korea, Vietnam, and Angola, where this cold war flared hot. Such a consideration of the Cold War–as a military event with sociopolitical and economic overtones–is the crux of this stellar collection of twenty-six essays compiled and edited by Robert Cowley, the longtime editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. Befitting such a complex and far-ranging period, the volume’s contributing writers cover myriad angles. John Prados, in “The War Scare of 1983,” shows just how close we were to escalating a war of words into a nuclear holocaust. Victor Davis Hanson offers “The Right Man,” his pungent reassessment of the bellicose air-power zealot Curtis LeMay as a man whose words were judged more critically than his actions. The secret war also gets its due in George Feiffer’s “The Berlin Tunnel,” which details the charismatic C.I.A. operative “Big Bill” Harvey’s effort to tunnel under East Berlin and tap Soviet phone lines–and the Soviets’ equally audacious reaction to the plan; while “The Truth About Overflights,” by R. Cargill Hall, sheds light on some of the Cold War’s best-kept secrets. The often overlooked human cost of fighting the Cold War finds a clear voice in “MIA” by Marilyn Elkins, the widow of a Navy airman, who details the struggle to learn the truth about her husband, Lt. Frank C. Elkins, whose A-4 Skyhawk disappeared over Vietnam in 1966. In addition there are profiles of the war’s “front lines”–Dien Bien Phu, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs–as well as of prominent military and civil leaders from both sides, including Harry S. Truman, Nikita Khrushchev, Dean Acheson, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Richard M. Nixon, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, and others. Encompassing so many perspectives and events, The Cold War succeeds at an impossible task: illuminating and explaining the history of an undeclared shadow war that threatened the very existence of humankind.

This story, published thirty years ago, remains extremely relevant to this day in that the author envisioned all problems related to the thankless task of nation-building in a multiethnic and multicultural Yugoslavia.

A reprint of the Harvard U. Press edition of 1977, this book analyzes one element in American cold war decision making--military advice and influence on the use of force--and considers how the proportion of military influence, relative to that of civilian advisers, has varied since WWII. Includes a new preface and epilogue to this edition. Paper edition (07469-7), $16.50. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The increasing capacity of states to muster violence, the concomitant rise of military power as a meaningful instrument of foreign policy, and the frequent episodic collapse of that power are considered in this examination of force, order, and diplomacy. Nathan points to periods of relative order and stability in international relations-the time immediately prior to the rise of Frederick the Great, for example, or the half century after the Napoleonic Wars-as times when states have been most vulnerable to spoilers and rogues. Only the power of the Cold War blocs fostered durable order. Now, notwithstanding novel elements of globalization, international relations appear as dependent as ever on the prudent management of force. Students, scholars, and soldiers are frequently exposed to Clausewitz, Westphalia, Napoleon, World War I, and the like. But what makes these events and individuals so important? This book is Clausewitz's successor, insisting that soldiers and statesmen know and master the integrative potential of force. Nathan provides a narrative account of the people and events that have shaped international relations since the onset of the state system. He asserts that an understanding of the limits and utility of persuasion, as well as the corresponding limits and utility of force, will help assure national security in a world filled with more uncertainties than ever in the last 50 years.

This text uses biographical techniques to test the question: did the advent of the nuclear bomb prevent World War III? It examines the careers of ten Cold War statesmen, and asks whether they viewed war, and its acceptability, differently after the advent of the bomb.