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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Other warfare & defence issues > Arms negotiation & control
In the controversial legacy of the Nixon presidency, the
administration's effort to curb and control the spread of the
world's weapons of mass destruction is often overlooked. And yet by
the time President Nixon left office under the cloud of the
Watergate scandal, his actions on this front had surpassed those of
all his predecessors combined and laid the foundations of WMD arms
control and nonproliferation policies that persist to this day. In
Averting Doomsday, Patrick Garrity and Erin Mahan explore and
assess Nixon's record, addressing not only nuclear but also
biological and chemical weapons. Drawing substantially on
presidential recordings and other primary sources not widely
consulted, the authors shed new light on milestones such as the
first SALT agreement on strategic nuclear weapons and the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, as well as the renunciation of US
offensive biological weapons and a Seabed treaty. The WMD-control
landscape had accumulated many divergent visions and interests over
time-technical, diplomatic, domestic political, and utopian. The
Nixon administration had to adjust to and build on this eclectic
foundation, creating a new layer of policies to deal with WMD that
substantially set the course-and perhaps limited the options-for
future administrations in ways that are still with us.
This business history analyzes the connections between private
business, disarmament, and re-armament as they affected arms
procurement and military technology transfers in Eastern Europe
from 1919 to 1939. Rather than focusing on the negotiations or the
political problems involved with the Disarmament Conferences, this
study concerns itself with the business effects of the disarmament
discussions. Accordingly, Schneider-Creusot, Skoda, Vickers, and
their respective business activities in Eastern European markets
serve as the chief subjects for this book, and the core primary
sources relied upon include their unpublished corporate archival
documents. Shifting the scope of analysis to consider the business
dimension allows for a fresh appraisal of the linkages between the
arms trade, disarmament, and re-armament. The business approach
also explodes the myth of the 'merchants of death' from the inside.
It concludes by tracing the armaments business between 1939 and
1941 as it transitioned from peacetime to war.
Despite deep roots in local community organizing and peace
activism, the peacebuilding field over the past two decades has
evolved into a stratified, and often disconnected, community of
academics, policymakers, and practitioners. While the growth into a
more recognized and professionalized field has led to significant
improvements in how decision-makers and influential thinkers accept
peace and conflict resolution theory and practice, it has also left
certain communities behind. Individual activists, community-based
groups, and locally-led civil society organizations - in other
words, the people most directly experiencing the results of violent
conflict and striving to overcome and transform it - remain notably
on the margins of what has become the more recognized
"international peacebuilding field." As a result, the inherent
links between policies and practices of the global North,
particularly the United States, where much of the professional
peacebuilding community is concentrated, and the daily realities of
rising violence and collapsing order experienced by communities in
the global South, are glossed over or apportioned to the fields of
political science or international affairs. Similarly, the daily
community level efforts of people and groups within the United
States and other global North countries seeking to address drivers
of violence and injustice in their own communities are largely
disconnected from the struggles of communities living inside
recognized war zones for a more peaceful and just future. These
disconnects within the peacebuilding field have increasingly become
obstacles to its further evolution and improvement. Without a
serious shift in direction toward more integrated, interconnected,
and intersectional understanding and approaches, the peacebuilding
field threatens to become just another Western-driven industry in
which powerful decision-makers, politicized funding, and large
international bureaucracies sustain themselves. Reconnecting the
field with its roots of community-based activism, organizing, and
courageous leadership is urgently needed, and a necessary step to
improving our collective efforts to build a more peaceful, just,
and sustainable world. Drawing on the voices and experiences of
community-based peace leaders around the world, this book envisions
a new way of working together as a truly local and global
peacebuilding field - one in which undoing the roots of violence
and injustice is not something that takes place "in the field", but
in the streets of our own neighborhoods and in solidarity with
others around the world.
The early 1980s were a tense time. The nuclear arms race was
escalating, Reagan administration officials bragged about winning a
nuclear war, and superpower diplomatic relations were at a new low.
Nuclear war was a real possibility and antinuclear activism surged.
By 1982 the Nuclear Freeze campaign had become the largest peace
movement in American history. In support, celebrities, authors,
publishers, and filmmakers saturated popular culture with critiques
of Reagan's arms buildup, which threatened to turn public opinion
against the president. Alarmed, the Reagan administration worked to
co- opt the rhetoric of the nuclear freeze and contain antinuclear
activism. Recently declassified White House memoranda reveal a
concerted campaign to defeat activists' efforts. In this book,
William M. Knoblauch examines these new sources, as well as the
influence of notable personalities like Carl Sagan and popular
culture such as the film The Day After, to demonstrate how cultural
activism ultimately influenced the administration's shift in
rhetoric and, in time, its stance on the arms race.
Space is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon
Musk are planning to colonize Mars. President Trump wants a "Space
Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expensive high-tech
weapons. The space and nuclear arms control regimes are threadbare
and disintegrating. Would-be asteroid collision diverters, space
solar energy collectors, asteroid miners, and space geo-engineers
insistently promote their Earth-changing mega-projects. Given our
many looming planetary catastrophes (from extreme climate change to
runaway artificial superintelligence), looking beyond the earth for
solutions might seem like a sound strategy for humanity. And
indeed, bolstered by a global network of fervent space
advocates-and seemingly rendered plausible, even inevitable, by
oceans of science fiction and the wizardly of modern cinema-space
beckons as a fully hopeful path for human survival and flourishing,
a positive future in increasingly dark times. But despite even
basic questions of feasibility, will these many space ventures
really have desirable effects, as their advocates insist? In the
first book to critically assess the major consequences of space
activities from their origins in the 1940s to the present and
beyond, Daniel Deudney argues in Dark Skies that the major result
of the "Space Age" has been to increase the likelihood of global
nuclear war, a fact conveniently obscured by the failure of
recognize that nuclear-armed ballistic missiles are inherently
space weapons. The most important practical finding of Space Age
science, also rarely emphasized, is the discovery that we live on
Oasis Earth, tiny and fragile, and teeming with astounding life,
but surrounded by an utterly desolate and inhospitable wilderness
stretching at least many trillions of miles in all directions. As
he stresses, our focus must be on Earth and nowhere else. Looking
to the future, Deudney provides compelling reasons why space
colonization will produce new threats to human survival and not
alleviate the existing ones. That is why, he argues, we should
fully relinquish the quest. Mind-bending and profound, Dark Skies
challenges virtually all received wisdom about the final frontier.
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