Cold War Reading

"We tend to think of the Cold War as a bounded conflict: a clash of two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, born out of the ashes of World War II and coming to a dramatic end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in this major new work, Bancroft Prize-winning scholar Odd Arne Westad argues that the Cold War must be understood as a global ideological confrontation, with early roots in the Industrial Revolution and ongoing repercussions...

"This study is the first to systematically assemble an original dataset of all American regime change operations during the Cold War. The United States attempted more than 10 times more covert than overt regime changes. The author asks three questions: What motivates states to attempt foreign regime changes? Why do states prefer to conduct these operations covertly, as opposed to overtly? How successful are these missions in achieving their foreign...

"This book looks at what makes alliances so credible as to prevent nuclear proliferation, how alliances can break down and encourage nuclear proliferation, and whether security guarantors like the United States can use their alliance ties to end the nuclear efforts of their allies"--

"To American planners and strategists at the outset of the Cold War, the ultimate way to gain ascendance over the USSR was only a question. What if the United States could defend its airspace while at the same time send a plane through Soviet skies undetected? A craft with such capacity would have to be essentially invisible to radar - an apparently miraculous feat of physics and engineering. In Stealth, Peter Westwick unveils the process by which...

Reveals the history of espionage and its use of and dependency on technology, beginning with the Second World War and continuing through the Cold War and into the present Internet age where hackers and surveillance are commonplace.