Most people think Star Wars began with the ideas of Ronald Reagan, but its roots reach decades further back. In this first scholarly account of the origins of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), historian Don Baucom traces these roots back to the dawn of the missile age in 1944. He finds SDI emerging after a period of nearly 40 years from forces generated by technological developments, changing strategic conditions, and the collapse of the SALT arms control negotiations of the 1970s.

The U.S. national security decision-making system is a product of the Cold War. Formed in 1947 with the National Security Council, it developed around the demands of competing with and containing the USSR. But the world after the collapse of communism and, particularly, the tragedy of September 11, is vastly different. A threatening but familiar enemy has given way to a complex environment of more diverse and less predictable threats. As the creation of the Homeland Security Council and Office of Homeland Security indicate, the United States must now reevaluate standard national security processes for this more uncertain world.In this timely book, William W. Newmann examines the way presidents manage their advisory process for national security decision making and the way that process evolves over the course of an administration's term. Three detailed case studies show how the president and his senior advisors managed arms control and nuclear strategy during the first terms of the Carter, Reagan, and G. H. W. Bush presidencies. These studies, enhanced by interviews with key members of the national security teams, including James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, reveal significant patterns of structure and adaptation. They provide a window to how decision making in the modern White House really works, at a moment when national security decisions are again at the top of the agenda.Specifically, Newmann investigates this pattern. Each president begins his administration with a standard National Security Councilÿbased interagency process, which he then streamlines toward a reliance on senior officials working in small groups, and a confidence structure of a few key advisors. Newmann examines the institutional pressures that push administrations in this direction, as he also weighs the impact of the leadership styles of the presidents themselves. In so doing, he reaches the conclusion that decision making can be an audition process through which presidents discover which advisors they trust. And the most successful process is one that balances formal, informal, and confidence sources to maintain full discussion of diverse opinions, while settling those debates informally at the senior-most levels.Unlike previous studies, Managing National Security Policy views decision making as dynamic, rather than as a static system inaugurated at the beginning of a president's term. The key to understanding the decision-making process rests upon the study of the evolving relationships between the president and his senior advisors. Awareness of this evolution paints a complex portrait of policy making, which may help future presidents design national security decision structures that fit the realities of the office in today's world.

This important text offers a clear, concise and affordable narrative and analytical history of American foreign policy since the Spanish-American War. The book narrates events and policies but goes further to emphasize the international setting and constraints within which American policy-makers had to operate, the domestic pressures on those policy-makers, and the ideologies, preferences, and personal idiosyncrasies of the leaders themselves.

Written by two preeminent authors in the field, this book provides an accessible global narrative of the nuclear arms race since 1945 that focuses on the roles of key scientists, military chiefs, and political leaders. The first book of its kind to provide a global perspective of the arms race, this two-volume work connects episodes worldwide involving nuclear weapons in a comprehensive, narrative fashion. Beginning with a discussion of the scientific research of the 1930s and 1940s and the Hiroshima decision, the authors focus on five basic themes: political dimensions, technological developments, military and diplomatic strategies, and impact. The history of the international nuclear arms race is examined within the context of four historical eras: America's nuclear monopoly, America's nuclear superiority, superpower parity, and the post-Cold War era. Information about the historical development of the independent deterrence of Britain, France, and China, as well as the piecemeal deterrence of newcomers Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea is also included, as is coverage of the efforts aimed at the international control of nuclear weapons and the diplomatic architecture that underpins the global nuclear non-proliferation regime.

A systematic critical survey of American strategic thinking and the strategic culture in which it is formed. In particular, this book seeks to interrogate the theory and strategy of nuclear deterrence, and its relationship to the concept of missile defence. Drawing widely on the theoretical literature in international relations and strategic studies, it identifies the key groups that have competed over America's nuclear policy post-1945 and examines how the concept of missile defence went through a process of gestation and intellectual contestation, leading to its eventual legitimization in the late 1990s. Steff sheds light on the individuals, groups, institutions and processes that led to the decision by the Bush administration to deploy a national missile defence shield. Additionally, Steff systematically examines the impact deployment had on the calculations of Russia and China. In the process he explains that their reactions under the Bush administration have continued into the Obama era, revealing that a new great power security dilemma has broken out. This, Steff shows, has led to a decline in great power relations as a consequence.

Rocket States crosses the disciplines of Cold War Studies, American Literature, American Studies and Cultural Studies. The particular attraction of this study lies in the combination of its range-close textual and visual analysis of the correlations between land and weaponry, set firmly within its political and cultural contexts-with its unique analytical approach. The book offers a synthesis between history, theories of technology, theories of space, popular culture, literary study and military science. It illuminates a variety of literary texts from key writers and thinkers such as Pynchon, Stephen King, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe, while also invoking figures like Nikola Tesla, James Webb, Batman and Ronald Reagan. Organised topographically, according to how missile technology manifests itself differently in particular locations, Rocket States's geographical targets are Colorado, Kansas, Cape Canaveral and New York, variously titled 'Excavation', 'Preservation', 'Evacuation' and 'Transmission'. It advances through these states roughly chronologically, beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s and coming to an end in the first part of the 21st century. Collignon's argument is concerned with identifying the recurring figures and fantasies of the Cold War: the dome or parabola as sheltering techno-form; the fictions of total security adapting to constantly changing targeting strategies; gadget love; closed, freezing worlds. As such, Rocket States analyses by what processes the Cold War is frequently literalised in its weapons installations and how these facilities, in turn, shape dreams of containment, survival, escape, techno-supremacy.

A new volume in the Global Century series, this masterful history of the world in our time captures the ground-level drama of events and the larger contours of change during a period of global transformation.