Super Bomb Ken Young, Warner R. Schilling
2020, 2020-02-15
eBook
Super Bomb unveils the story of the events leading up to President Harry S. Truman's 1950 decision to develop a "super, " or hydrogen, bomb. That fateful decision and its immediate consequences are ...detailed in a diverse and complete account built on newly released archives and previously hidden contemporaneous interviews with more than sixty political, military, and scientific figures who were involved in the decision. Ken Young and Warner R. Schilling present the expectations, hopes, and fears of the key individuals who lobbied for and against developing the H-bomb. They portray the conflicts that arose over the H-bomb as rooted in the distinct interests of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Los Alamos laboratory, the Pentagon and State Department, the Congress, and the White House. But as they clearly show, once Truman made his decision in 1950, resistance to the H-bomb opportunistically shifted to new debates about the development of tactical nuclear weapons, continental air defense, and other aspects of nuclear weapons policy. What Super Bomb reveals is that in many ways the H-bomb struggle was a proxy battle over the morality and effectiveness of strategic bombardment and the role and doctrine of the US Strategic Air Command.
This book provides a new analysis of why relations between the United States and the Chinese Communists were so hostile in the first decade of the Cold War. Employing extensive documentation, it ...offers a fresh approach to long- debated questions such as why Truman refused to recognize the Chinese Communists, why the United States aided Chiang Kai-shek's KMT on Taiwan, why the Korean War escalated into a Sino-American conflict, and why Mao shelled islands in the Taiwan Straits in 1958, thus sparking a major crisis with the United States. Christensen first develops a novel two-level approach that explains why leaders manipulate low-level conflicts to mobilize popular support for expensive, long-term security strategies. By linking "grand strategy, " domestic politics, and the manipulation of ideology and conflict, Christensen provides a nuanced and sophisticated link between domestic politics and foreign policy. He then applies the approach to Truman's policy toward the Chinese Communists in 1947-50 and to Mao's initiation of the 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis. In these cases the extension of short-term conflict was useful in gaining popular support for the overall grand strategy that each leader was promoting domestically: Truman's limited-containment strategy toward the USSR and Mao's self-strengthening programs during the Great Leap Forward. Christensen also explores how such low-level conflicts can escalate, as they did in Korea, despite leaders' desire to avoid actual warfare.
This new "Reader's Edition" of Harry Truman's memoirs removes the overload of detail and reproduced historical documents, reduces the bloated cast of characters, clarifies the often confusing balance ...between chronological and thematic presentation, and corrects some important problems of presentation that made the two volumes of Truman's memoirs, published in 1955 and 1956, difficult to read and enjoy. This new edition, reduced to half the length of the original text, offers a new generation of readers the thrill of hearing the unique and authentic voice of Harry S. Truman, probably the most important president of the last seventy-five years, telling the story of his life, his presidency, and some of the most important years in American history.
Harry and Arthur Haas, Lawrence J
2016, 20160401, 2016-04-01
eBook
With Franklin Roosevelt's death in April of 1945, Vice President Harry Truman and Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader on foreign policy, inherited a world in turmoil. With Europe flattened ...and the Soviets emerging as America's new adversary, Truman and Vandenberg built a tight partnership with one another to address the challenges at hand. Working in strong bipartisan fashion at a bitterly partisan time, they crafted a dramatic new foreign policy through which the United States stepped boldly onto the world stage for the first time to protect its friends, confront its enemies, and promote freedom. These two men-unlikely partners by way of personality and style-transformed the United States from a reluctant global giant to a self-confident leader; from a nation that traditionally turned inward after war to one that remained engaged to shape the postwar landscape; and from a nation with no real military establishment to one that now spends more on defense than the next dozen nations combined.Lawrence J. Haas, an award-winning journalist, reveals how, through the close collaboration of Truman and Vandenberg, the United States created the United Nations to replace the League of Nations, pursued the Truman Doctrine to defend freedom from Communist threat, launched the Marshall Plan to rescue Western Europe's economy from the devastation of war, and established NATO to defend Western Europe.
What was left, in both senses of the word, of liberalism after the death of Franklin Roosevelt? This question has aroused considerable historical debate because it raises the question of why the ...United States, during the Truman years, developed a much less state-centered orthodoxy than other comparable, powerful liberal states. What were the consequences of this fundamental choice that would shape the character and direction of American society during the second half of the twentieth century? This book explores the role of the Cold War in shifting the center of gravity in American politics sharply to the right in the years immediately following World War II. Jonathan Bell demonstrates that there was far more active and vibrant debate about the potential for liberal ideas before they become submerged in Cold War anti-state rhetoric than has generally been recognized. Using case studies from Senate and House races from 1946 to 1952, Bell shows how the anti-statist imagery that defined the Cold War in political debate became the key weapon among right-wing and business interest groups and their political representatives with which to discredit political figures who wanted to expand political liberalism beyond existing New Deal measures. He depicts how this process implicitly endorsed socioeconomic inequality.
Defeated by Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists fled to Taiwan to establish a rival state, thereby creating the Two Chinas dilemma that vexes international diplomacy to this day. Hsiao-ting ...Lin challenges this conventional narrative, showing the many ways the ad hoc creation of this not fully sovereign state was accidental and serendipitous.
The First Cold Warrior Spalding, Elizabeth Edwards; Spalding, Elizabeth Edwards Edwards
05/2006
eBook
From the first days of his unexpected presidency in April 1945 through the landmark NSC 68 of 1950, Harry Truman was central to the formation of America's grand strategy during the Cold War and the ...subsequent remaking of U.S. foreign policy. Others are frequently associated with the terminology of and responses to the perceived global Communist threat after the Second World War: Walter Lippmann popularized the term "cold war," and George F. Kennan first used the word "containment" in a strategic sense. Although Kennan, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall have been seen as the most influential architects of American Cold War foreign policy, The First Cold Warrior draws on archives and other primary sources to demonstrate that Harry Truman was the key decision maker in the critical period between 1945 and 1950. In a significant reassessment of the thirty-third president and his political beliefs, Elizabeth Edwards Spalding contends that it was Truman himself who defined and articulated the theoretical underpinnings of containment. His practical leadership style was characterized by policies and institutions such as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Berlin airlift, the Department of Defense, and the National Security Council. Part of Truman's unique approach -- shaped by his religious faith and dedication to anti-communism -- was to emphasize the importance of free peoples, democratic institutions, and sovereign nations. With these values, he fashioned a new liberal internationalism, distinct from both Woodrow Wilson's progressive internationalism and Franklin D. Roosevelt's liberal pragmatism, which still shapes our politics. Truman deserves greater credit for understanding the challenges of his time and for being America's first cold warrior. This reconsideration of Truman's overlooked statesmanship provides a model for interpreting the international crises facing the United States in this new era of ideological conflict.
