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In the heady days of the Cold War, when the Bomb loomed large in the ruminations of Washington’s wise men, policy intellectuals flocked to the home of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter to discuss deterrence and doomsday. The Cold World They Made takes a fresh look at the original power couple of strategic studies. Seeking to unravel the complex tapestry of the Wohlstetters’ world and worldview, Ron Robin reveals fascinating insights into an unlikely husband-and-wife pair who, at the height of the most dangerous military standoff in history, gained access to the deepest corridors of American power. The author of such classic Cold War treatises as “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” Albert Wohlstetter is remembered for advocating an aggressive brinksmanship that stood in stark contrast with what he saw as weak and indecisive policies of Soviet containment. Yet Albert’s ideas built crucially on insights gleaned from his wife. Robin makes a strong case for the Wohlstetters as a team of intellectual equals, showing how Roberta’s scholarship was foundational to what became known as the Wohlstetter Doctrine. Together at RAND Corporation, Albert and Roberta crafted a mesmerizing vision of the Soviet threat, theorizing ways for the United States to emerge victorious in a thermonuclear exchange. Far from dwindling into irrelevance after the Cold War, the torch of the Wohlstetters’ intellectual legacy was kept alive by well-placed disciples in George W. Bush’s administration. Through their ideological heirs, the Wohlstetters’ signature combination of brilliance and hubris continues to shape American policies.
A multidisciplinary collection of essays reflecting on Cold War cultural tropes in film, fiction, and contemporary art, and the models of knowledge that they imply. If the term “Cold World” describes a world of infinite complexity, algorithmic capital, and the technological sublime, in many ways the dread experienced during the Cold War, when clear oppositions were laid out between nation states, is echoed in the hall of mirrors of Cold World globalization, where our collective consciousness is overtaken by a flood of difference, uncertainty, and the dread of the incomputability of this alien yet constructed world. But what is the crime scene of the Cold World? How is it to be decrypted? Where are its discontinuities, what is the nature of its violence? This is to say, what is our place in this alien world and how do we even compute the “we” that we describe ourselves to be? Given the existential uncertainty unleashed for those who lived through the Cold War, but whose repercussions are in many ways amplified, relayed, and replayed in a new form for those who must now survive what has been called the “Cold World”—that of technological subjectivation, political malaise, cultural dysphoria, and ecological crisis—this terrain comprises an experiential and experimental horizon that prompts many to pose, and to stage in myriad forms, a fundamental question: “What will we of make of ourselves?” Cold War/Cold World documents a research project in progress that attempts to evaluate and respond to this fundamental shock to the system, examining attempts to render knowable, representable, or figurable the looming threats of both Cold War and Cold World—the common denominator being a distressed attempt to inquire into the dynamics of a real that seems in excess over understanding and the means of politics traditionally conceived; and a concomitant temptation to abandon any intelligent collective engagement in favour of a pragmatics that limits itself to wrestling with local contingencies, or an aesthetics mesmerised by a global sublime.
The Cold War shaped the world we live in today - its politics, economics, and military affairs. This book shows how the globalization of the Cold War during the last century created the foundations for most of the key conflicts we see today, including the War on Terror. It focuses on how the Third World policies of the two twentieth-century superpowers - the United States and the Soviet Union - gave rise to resentments and resistance that in the end helped topple one superpower and still seriously challenge the other. Ranging from China to Indonesia, Iran, Ethiopia, Angola, Cuba, and Nicaragua, it provides a truly global perspective on the Cold War. And by exploring both the development of interventionist ideologies and the revolutionary movements that confronted interventions, the book links the past with the present in ways that no other major work on the Cold War era has succeeded in doing.
The definitive history of the Cold War and its impact around the world 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 around the world. In The Cold War, Westad offers a new perspective on a century when great power rivalry and ideological battle transformed every corner of our globe. From Soweto to Hollywood, Hanoi, and Hamburg, young men and women felt they were fighting for the future of the world. The Cold War may have begun on the perimeters of Europe, but it had its deepest reverberations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where nearly every community had to choose sides. And these choices continue to define economies and regimes across the world. Today, many regions are plagued with environmental threats, social divides, and ethnic conflicts that stem from this era. Its ideologies influence China, Russia, and the United States; Iraq and Afghanistan have been destroyed by the faith in purely military solutions that emerged from the Cold War. Stunning in its breadth and revelatory in its perspective, this book expands our understanding of the Cold War both geographically and chronologically and offers an engaging new history of how today's world was created.
This book explores how and why the dangerous yet seemingly durable and stable world order forged during the Cold War collapsed in 1989, and how a new order was improvised out of its ruins. It is an unusual blend of memoir and scholarship that takes us back to the years when the East-West conflict came to a sudden end and a new world was born. In this book, senior officials and opinion leaders from the United States, Russia, Western and Eastern Europe who were directly involved in the decisions of that time describe their considerations, concerns, and pressures. They are joined by scholars who have been able to draw on newly declassified archival sources to revisit this challenging period.
Latin America and the Global Cold War analyzes more than a dozen of Latin America's forgotten encounters with Africa, Asia, and the Communist world, and by placing the region in meaningful dialogue with the wider Global South, this volume produces the first truly global history of contemporary Latin America. It uncovers a multitude of overlapping and sometimes conflicting iterations of Third Worldist movements in Latin America, offers insights for better understanding the region's past and possible futures, and challenges us to consider how the Global Cold War continues to inform Latin America's ongoing political struggles. Contributors: Miguel Serra Coelho, Thomas C. Field Jr., Sarah Foss, Michelle Getchell, Eric Gettig, Alan McPherson, Stella Krepp, Eline van Ommen, Eugenia Palieraki, Vanni Pettina, Tobias Rupprecht, David M. K. Sheinin, Christy Thornton, Miriam Elizabeth Villanueva, and Odd Arne Westad.
The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology--and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories--the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture--through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. Edwards begins by describing the emergence of a "closed-world discourse" of global surveillance and control through high-technology military power. The Cold War political goal of "containment" led to the SAGE continental air defense system, Rand Corporation studies of nuclear strategy, and the advanced technologies of the Vietnam War. These and other centralized, computerized military command and control projects--for containing world-scale conflicts--helped closed-world discourse dominate Cold War political decisions. Their apotheosis was the Reagan-era plan for a " Star Wars" space-based ballistic missile defense. Edwards then shows how these military projects helped computers become axial metaphors in psychological theory. Analyzing the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, and the early history of artificial intelligence, he describes the formation of a "cyborg discourse." By constructing both human minds and artificial intelligences as information machines, cyborg discourse assisted in integrating people into the hyper-complex technological systems of the closed world. Finally, Edwards explores the cyborg as political identity in science fiction--from the disembodied, panoptic AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the mechanical robots of Star Wars and the engineered biological androids of Blade Runner--where Information Age culture and subjectivity were both reflected and constructed. Inside Technology series
In this magisterial and pathbreaking work, Csaba Bekes shares decades of his research to provide a sweeping examination of Hungary's international relations with both the Soviet Bloc and the West from the end of World War II to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Unlike many studies of the global Cold War that focus on East-West relationships—often from the vantage point of the West—Bekes grounds his work in the East, drawing on little-used, non-English sources. As such, he offers a new and sweeping Cold War narrative using Hungary as a case study, demonstrating that the East-Central European states have played a much more important role in shaping both the Soviet bloc's overall policy and the East-West relationship than previously assumed. Similarly, he shows how the relationship between Moscow and its allies, as well as among the bloc countries, was much more complex than it appeared to most observers in the East and the West alike.
After World War II, the major powers faced social upheaval at home and anticolonial wars around the globe. Alarmed by conflict in Korea that could change U.S.–Soviet relations from chilly to nuclear, ordinary people and policymakers created a fantasy of a bipolar Cold War world in which global and domestic order was paramount, Masuda Hajimu shows.
A critique of capital through the lens of war, and a critique of war through the lens of the revolution of 1968. “We are at war,” declared the President of the French Republic on the evening of November 13, 2015. But what is this war, exactly? In Wars and Capital, Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato propose a counter-history of capitalism to recover the reality of the wars that are inflicted on us and denied to us. We experience not the ideal war of philosophers, but wars of class, race, sex, and gender; wars of civilization and the environment; wars of subjectivity that are raging within populations and that constitute the secret motor of liberal governmentality. By naming the enemy (refugees, migrants, Muslims), the new fascisms establish their hegemony on the processes of political subjectivation by reducing them to racist, sexist, and xenophobic slogans, fanning the flames of war among the poor and maintaining the total war philosophy of neoliberalism. Because war and fascism are the repressed elements of post-'68 thought, Alliez and Lazzarato not only read the history of capital through war but also read war itself through the strange revolution of '68, which made possible the passage from war in the singular to a plurality of wars—and from wars to the construction of new war machines against contemporary financialization. It is a question of pushing “'68 thought” beyond its own limits and redirecting it towards a new pragmatics of struggle linked to the continuous war of capital. It is especially important for us to prepare ourselves for the battles we will have to fight if we do not want to be always defeated.