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Author: Peter Roman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150174478X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Uncertainty about Soviet intentions and capabilities after the launch of Sputnik required changes in U.S. strategic nuclear policy; Peter J. Roman draws from recently declassified archives to examine of one of the most unstable periods in the Cold War. Roman argues that presidential leadership from 1957 to 1960 was crucial to national security. Dwight D. Eisenhower was, he argues, actively involved in all nuclear policy making. His responses to the extreme uncertainty of the late 1950s shaped American nuclear policy for decades, and in its internal deliberations his administration anticipated much of the subsequent public debate. Eisenhower and the Missile Gap investigates a variety of issues, actors, and institutions to explain how a government deals with high levels of technological uncertainty. Several significant themes emerge: the evolution of American perceptions of vulnerability; problems in intelligence collection and analysis; the integration of new weapons systems into strategy; the influence of the armed forces; the impact of organizational interests on policy and force decisions; Eisenhower's internal and external leadership style; and presidential management of defense and foreign policy.
Author: Peter Roman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150174478X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Uncertainty about Soviet intentions and capabilities after the launch of Sputnik required changes in U.S. strategic nuclear policy; Peter J. Roman draws from recently declassified archives to examine of one of the most unstable periods in the Cold War. Roman argues that presidential leadership from 1957 to 1960 was crucial to national security. Dwight D. Eisenhower was, he argues, actively involved in all nuclear policy making. His responses to the extreme uncertainty of the late 1950s shaped American nuclear policy for decades, and in its internal deliberations his administration anticipated much of the subsequent public debate. Eisenhower and the Missile Gap investigates a variety of issues, actors, and institutions to explain how a government deals with high levels of technological uncertainty. Several significant themes emerge: the evolution of American perceptions of vulnerability; problems in intelligence collection and analysis; the integration of new weapons systems into strategy; the influence of the armed forces; the impact of organizational interests on policy and force decisions; Eisenhower's internal and external leadership style; and presidential management of defense and foreign policy.
Author: Charles Stross
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781596060586
Category : Alternative histories (Fiction)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Alternative history novella. "It's 1976 again ... the Cold War is in full swing -- and the earth is flat. It has been flat ever since the eve of the Cuban war of 1962."
Author: Christopher A. Preble
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cold War
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Capitalizing on fear of nuclear war, months after Kennedy's inauguration he won Congressional authorization for two supplemental appropriations that increased the defense budget by more than 15 percent. This study of the political uses of an alleged threat to national security, argues that the missile gap was a myth.
Author: David M. Barrett
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603447687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, questions persisted about how the potential cataclysm had been allowed to develop. A subsequent congressional investigation focused on what came to be known as the “photo gap”: five weeks during which intelligence-gathering flights over Cuba had been attenuated. In Blind over Cuba, David M. Barrett and Max Holland challenge the popular perception of the Kennedy administration’s handling of the Soviet Union’s surreptitious deployment of missiles in the Western Hemisphere. Rather than epitomizing it as a masterpiece of crisis management by policy makers and the administration, Barrett and Holland make the case that the affair was, in fact, a close call stemming directly from decisions made in a climate of deep distrust between key administration officials and the intelligence community. Because of White House and State Department fears of “another U-2 incident” (the infamous 1960 Soviet downing of an American U-2 spy plane), the CIA was not permitted to send surveillance aircraft on prolonged flights over Cuban airspace for many weeks, from late August through early October. Events proved that this was precisely the time when the Soviets were secretly deploying missiles in Cuba. When Director of Central Intelligence John McCone forcefully pointed out that this decision had led to a dangerous void in intelligence collection, the president authorized one U-2 flight directly over western Cuba—thereby averting disaster, as the surveillance detected the Soviet missiles shortly before they became operational. The Kennedy administration recognized that their failure to gather intelligence was politically explosive, and their subsequent efforts to influence the perception of events form the focus for this study. Using recently declassified documents, secondary materials, and interviews with several key participants, Barrett and Holland weave a story of intra-agency conflict, suspicion, and discord that undermined intelligence-gathering, adversely affected internal postmortems conducted after the crisis peaked, and resulted in keeping Congress and the public in the dark about what really happened. Fifty years after the crisis that brought the superpowers to the brink, Blind over Cuba: The Photo Gap and the Missile Crisis offers a new chapter in our understanding of that pivotal event, the tensions inside the US government during the cold war, and the obstacles Congress faces when conducting an investigation of the executive branch.
Author: Gretchen Heefner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674067460
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
In the 1960s the Air Force buried 1,000 ICBMs in pastures across the Great Plains to keep U.S. nuclear strategy out of view. As rural civilians of all political stripes found themselves living in the Soviet crosshairs, a proud Plains individualism gave way to an economic dependence on the military-industrial complex that still persists today.
Author: Alice L. George
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 9780807861615
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
For thirteen days in October 1962, America stood at the brink of nuclear war. Nikita Khrushchev's decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba and John F. Kennedy's defiant response introduced the possibility of unprecedented cataclysm. The immediate threat of destruction entered America's classrooms and its living rooms. Awaiting Armageddon provides the first in-depth look at this crisis as it roiled outside of government offices, where ordinary Americans realized their government was unprepared to protect either itself or its citizens from the dangers of nuclear war. During the seven days between Kennedy's announcement of a naval blockade and Khrushchev's decision to withdraw Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba, U.S. citizens absorbed the nightmare scenario unfolding on their television sets. An estimated ten million Americans fled their homes; millions more prepared shelters at home, clearing the shelves of supermarkets and gun stores. Alice George captures the irrationality of the moment as Americans coped with dread and resignation, humor and pathos, terror and ignorance. In her examination of the public response to the missile crisis, the author reveals cracks in the veneer of American confidence in the early years of the space age and demonstrates how the fears generated by Cold War culture blinded many Americans to the dangers of nuclear war until it was almost too late.
Author: United States. Central Intelligence Agency
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781497353305
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 60
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Book Description
In the mid-1950s the US faced the first real challenge since World War II to its strategic superiority over other nations on earth. The attempt to collect intelligence on the Soviets began with an initial period of poor collection capabilities and consequent limited analysis.The Missile Gap was in essence a growing perception in the West, especially in the USA, that the Soviet Union was quickly developing an intercontinental range ballistic missile (ICBM) capability earlier, in greater numbers, and with far more capability than that of the United States.Both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations struggled to formulate policy in response to what was then believed to be an ever-growing advantage in Soviet strategic missiles. With few well-placed human sources inside the Soviet Union, it was only with the CIA's development of, what can only be called, timely technological wizardry—the U-2 aircraft and Corona Satellite reconnaissance program—that breakthroughs occurred in gaining valuable, game-changing intelligence. Coupled with the innovative use of aerial and satellite photography and other technical collection programs, the efforts began to produce solid, national intelligence. These breakthroughs in technology and photography eventually provided the CIA with a more accurate assessment of actual Soviet missile capacity, allowing policy makers to shift gears. This collection tells the story of this technology catch-up that helped the U.S. penetrate the "iron curtain" and uncover the truth about their capabilities.
Author: Elie Abel
Publisher: Bantam Books
ISBN:
Category : Cuba
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
President Kennedy's decisive action during the 1962 nuclear confrontation between Russia and the U.S. over missle sites in Cuba is chronicled.
Author: Edgar M. Bottome
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Traces and analyzes the complex and often contradictory forces that led to a popular belief in the United States that the Soviet Union possessed a commanding superiority over the United States in ballistic missiles during the period 1958-1961.
Author: Serhii Plokhy
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393540820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426
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Book Description
"The definitive history.…With his masterly book, Mr. Plokhy has sounded a warning bell." — The Economist A harrowing account of the Cuban missile crisis and how the US and USSR came to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today’s world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis. Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground. In breathtaking detail, Plokhy vividly recounts the young JFK being played by the canny Khrushchev; the hotheaded Castro willing to defy the USSR and threatening to align himself with China; the Soviet troops on the ground clearing jungle foliage in the tropical heat, and desperately trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba, which were nonetheless easily spotted by U-2 spy planes; and the hair-raising near misses at sea that nearly caused a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine to fire its weapons. More often than not, the Americans and Soviets misread each other, operated under false information, and came perilously close to nuclear catastrophe. Despite these errors, nuclear war was ultimately avoided for one central reason: fear, and the realization that any escalation on either the Soviets’ or the Americans’ part would lead to mutual destruction. Drawing on a range of Soviet archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, as well as White House tapes, Plokhy masterfully illustrates the drama and anxiety of those tense days, and provides a way for us to grapple with the problems posed in our present day.
