Two of Great Britain's leading maritime specialists take a comprehensive, analytical look at the development, purposes, and importance of the Soviet Navy.

A review of the Soviet Navy by two maritime specialists placing it in its domestic and international context assessing its present and future roles by looking at its ships, submarines, aircraft, its exercises and patterns of deployment and by interpreting the Soviet Navy's own writings.

This book, first published in 1981, is an analysis of the Soviet Union’s military strategy, taking in both sides of the ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ views of the USSR’s intentions. It examines the Soviet approach to nuclear war, defence and deterrence in the nuclear age and the calculation of risk in the use of the military instrument. One of the main themes running through the chapters is that although the Soviet Union clearly does not view military issues in the same way as does the West, their approach is not necessarily aggressive and dangerous in all respects.

This book, first published in 1991, analyses the unprecedented changes, as well as the troubling continuities, that characterized Soviet military thinking during the early 1990s.

The Red Sea basin lies within a region syllogized variously as the 'arc of instability, ' the 'crescent of crises' and the 'crumbling triangle.' Regardless of the metaphor utilized, this volatile cul-de-sac pulses with instability. The pattern of Soviet strategy that emerges for the Red Sea basin indicates not a grand design, but rather an attempt to manage regional instability in accordance with Russian national interests. Destabilizing events provide Moscow with targets of opportunity which are selectively exploited to achieve foreign policy goals. These goals are strategic, political and economic in nature. Naval diplomacy implemented by the maturing Soviet Navy comprises an essential and, at times, decisive element of the overall strategy for the Red Sea basin. Frequently, the Soviet military assistance program, assiduously cultivated in the region, provides the exploitive vehicle with which to capitalize on targets of opportunity generated by the persistent patterns of instability. Moscow's strategy for the Red Sea basin is supported by the major components of the Soviet bureaucracy: defense and heavy industries, armed forces, fishing and maritime fleets and ideological agencies. It is unlikely to change in the aftermath of the Brezhnev succession. (Author).