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On May 18, 1966, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara delivered a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Montreal entitled “Security in the Contemporary World.” Building on remarks that he had made in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), the title was deceptively bland and belied its significance. McNamara, heretofore loyal to Johnson, was publicly breaking ranks with official administration policy on Vietnam. In the weeks prior, back in the Pentagon, McNamara had considered and authorized the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s (JCS) proposals, which National Security Advisor Walt W. Rostow had endorsed, to expand Operation...

In the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraqi forces prosecuted a mass campaign of pillage and destruction. Under the coordinated direction of Iraqi curators who were well acquainted with Kuwait’s cultural treasures, occupying Iraqi troops plundered thousands of cultural objects from museums, libraries, and archives. Among the pillaged cultural spoils were Kuwait’s national archives, comprising the emirate’s historical memory. Until recently, Iraq was beholden to UN sanctions demanding the return of missing persons and property, including Kuwait’s archives. Although the United Nations Security Council for many years has facilitated efforts to search for the lost archives, these efforts have proved futile. This article explores the plausibility of the two most likely scenarios surrounding the cold case of Kuwait’s missing archives: 1) that the current search for the archives has overlooked the possibility that they were unknowingly seized by US forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and are currently being held by the Pentagon; and 2) that the archives may have been intentionally destroyed as part of Saddam Hussein’s aim to obliterate Kuwait’s national identity and annex the emirate as Iraq’s nineteenth province.

Bush’s Iraq War, as Henriksen describes, is the apogee in America’s cycles of international engagement since the Cold War. Bush defied allies along with others in going to war without UN approval. This war, pretexted on the notion that Iraq possessed chemical and nuclear weapons, sees implementation of a preemptive war strategy to prevent mega-death weapons being used. The Pentagon quickly defeats Hussein’s armies before stumbling into an insurgency and sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. The White House turns to its second rationale for invasion when it finds no weapons of mass destruction. It embraces democracy promotion with a Wilsonian fervor not only in Iraq but also in the Republic of Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan Lebanon while intervening militarily in Liberia and Haiti to save democracy.

Scholars, journalists, and government officials have tried to understand al-Qa'ida and its predecessor, Maktab al-Khidamat, since the early 1980s. These efforts increased significantly after the 11 September 2001 attacks against the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon. Yet, despite this attention, questions remain unanswered. What factors have influenced al-Qa'ida leaders over time as they have made and executed strategic decisions? How have they defined their relationship with affiliated groups in the context of these decisions? This present article utilizes private al-Qa'ida documents, captured by United States Navy Seals during a raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, and recently released to the public, to answer these questions. In doing so, it casts doubt on some of the conventional explanations for al-Qa'ida's trajectory between 2004 and 2013.

In the past few years, the Indian Ocean has emerged as a major center of geostrategic interest. The Pentagon's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) set the tone by calling for a more “integrated a...

Three applications of memoir theory and reception—the ethics of betrayal, the calibration of transparency, and the unknown knowledge called "nescience"—illuminate the public reaction to state secrets, from the Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks. The correlations between family secrets and state secrets yield new ways to understand the workings of secrecy in contemporary culture.

Joint Task Force (JTF) Guantánamo, the high-profile US military detention and inter- rogation operation, was established in January 2002 to house the ‘worst of the worst’ of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It nevertheless became a public spectacle that was essen- tial for constituting the reality of a Global War on Terror. Through evolving media and VIP tours of the facilities coupled with the Bush administration’s military analyst programme (a system of reverse embeds used to promote Pentagon messages within the U.S. media), Guantánamo became a simulation essential for producing the real- ity of the war. It became a key way to convince the public that the war was real and necessary, but also that its conduct was just and humane, and therefore, by exten- sion, that the United States can be understood as ‘good’. Through a triple screen of the tours, the visitors and their mediation, the telegenic spectacle of Guantánamo was transmuted into a reality of Guantánamo as ‘safe, humane, legal and transparent’. The importance of this for producing understandings of the Global War on Terrorism (GWoT) bears closer examination. Without this triple screen, Guantánamo does not exist.

In Arlington National Cemetery on September 12, 2002, the defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, presided over the burial with full military honors of a single casket containing unidentified remains intended to represent all 184 victims of the 9/11 Pentagon attack, a number that included civilian and military personnel on the ground and passengers on American Airlines Flight 77. Their collective grave, marked by a four-and-a-half-foot granite monument, sits within eyesight of the building where they died. The Pentagon Group Burial Marker, folded at the time of its dedication into Bush administration justifications for the planned invasion of Iraq, is today linked both in official and unofficial discourses to a set of monuments and graves scattered throughout the cemetery related to incidents of terrorism in the post-Vietnam era. The linkage gains fresh urgency as casualties mount from what has been defined as a war against terrorism. This article argues that these monuments are freighted with new historical meanings, justifications, and claims to legitimacy, drawn into a longer story of American victimization, Islamic aggression, reluctant empire, and triumphant U.S. nationalism and military virtue.

This article considers the truth value of the BBC's reporting of the invasion of Iraq in the context of Hannah Arendt's consideration of the US invasion of Vietnam. Arendt theorized that the ‘Pentagon Papers’ exposed a new approach to truth and lies – the ‘modern political lie’ at the heart of modern politics. In this article, Arendt's concept of the modern political lie is examined and comparisons made with Iraq. A case study of the BBC's coverage of the invasion is used to argue that its reporting did not necessarily lie about Iraq, nor did it necessarily create a discursive representation separate to the physical actions of the protagonists. Rather, it appears that strategic considerations on the part of the invading powers changed the factual texture on the ground, which reporting failed to keep up with.

This essay undertakes a comparative review of radical innovation in the early Cold War, when UK jet propulsion development far outpaced any US efforts. British ingenuity created a series of jet engines which Americans adopted. One among these, which captures contrasting organisational formats for handling complexity and innovation, was the Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire, a tough, reliable propulsion system. The USAF’s licence assigned production to Curtiss-Wright, which had made piston engines for decades and which spectacularly botched the project, wasting millions. Eventually, the Pentagon shifted the J-65 American Sapphire to GM's Buick division, which finally fabricated adequate but obsolete engines in the mid-1950s.

In 1966, the social scientists of the Simulmatics Corporation arrived in Saigon. Tasked by the Pentagon with helping to pacify South Vietnam, they conducted political and social psychological research on Viet Cong defectors, government soldiers, and Vietnamese villagers. This essay argues that Simulmatics's work captures some of the ironies of Cold War social science: its tendency to mask militarization behind the rhetoric of peaceful nation-building, its blurring of data collection and intelligence gathering, and its ambitious dedication to revealing the unseen contents of hearts and minds while remaining ignorant of the historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts in which its subjects lived. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

It may finally be possible after more than 35 years of debate to form a consensus as to what John McNaughton really believed concerning U.S. involvement in Vietnam and when he believed it. The recent discovery of a diary in the possession of his family allows for an unfiltered look at his thoughts regarding the administration's commitment. This personal and confidential journal clarifies McNaughton's views and in doing so comes down strongly on the side of the recollections of his colleagues in government who contemplated, debated, and anguished over the issue with him. The log commences on January 1, 1966 and concludes in late April, 1967, just three months prior to the death of McNaughton, his wife, and their younger son in a plane crash. Within its 181 pages are John McNaughton's thoughts about the various issues on which he worked and the individuals with whom he dealt inside the Johnson White House, State Department, and Pentagon. The Vietnam passages among the 107 separate entries document his consistent and persistent opposition to U.S. policy.

Stars and Stripes is a unique newspaper with a distinctive mission, ownership and journalistic staff unlike any in the USA. Despite its parentage in the US Department of Defense, directives give the newspaper editorial independence. Still, military commanders and Pentagon overseers have challenged and interfered with those rights since the newspaper's First World War beginnings in Europe. This study examines the published accounts of that struggle, finding that despite the newspaper's journalistic successes, the military has periodically engaged in control and interference, particularly because of the newspaper's logistical dependence upon the Department of Defense. Stars and Stripes' achievements have largely been dependent upon having the support of various military commanders in charge of US overseas military forces, having military editors or publishers who were resolute against military intrusion, or having the involvement of Congressional oversight committees and other news media willing to expose m...

Thinking back on the globally televised images of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in which two airplanes flew into the World Trade Center, one aircraft hit the Pentagon in Washington, and another one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, the questions “whose suicide?” and “the collapse of what?” appear unmistakably straightforward. Nineteen Islamic suicide bombers turned their deaths into weapons, causing the collapse of the World Trade Center. However, taking a broader perspective, it is much less clear who committed suicide and what collapsed on September 11, 2001. This article addresses the question of whether the attacks were a sign of strength, or rather a symptom of ultimate despair. The article first engages with and develops a critique of Baudrillard’s contention that the dominant Western order, which is based on the extrapolation of Good and the fostering of life, cannot survive an attack by radicals who utilize death as a weapon and turn Western globalization against itself. Secondly, the idea that the September 11 attacks are, conversely, a desperate attempt to escape structural crisis, signaling the prelude of Islamic neofundamentalist violence, will be assessed. It will be argued that, rather than the self-inflicted death of the global liberal order by means of irrational destructive terrorism, or the imminent collapse of Islamic fundamentalism, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the subsequent war on terror exhibit the tensions between a global order characterized by “destructive construction” and the “constructive destruction” that mark contemporary terrorist violence. Their mutual complex interrelations, their reciprocal fascination for one another and the intricate interconnections with processes of globalization – that prevent the death of either one – present a conflict that is of, against, within, and eluding the grasp of the dominant order in a continuous play of antagonism, destruction, mixture, tension, translation, and fissure.

The White House and the Pentagon have designated the military's Special Operations Command as the lead organization in the ‘war on terror’. As the military has become more involved in fighting terrorism since 9/11, special operations forces have become increasingly active in the covert, or unacknowledged, operations that have traditionally been the CIA's bailiwick. This article examines the turf battles caused by the Pentagon's new covert profile, as well as its ramifications for congressional oversight.

In a book well deserving of the Merton Award, Lynn Eden (2004) lays out her overarching thesis imaginatively, clearly, and with impressive scholar ship. She asks: why has the US government seriously underestimated for more than a half-century the damage that nuclear weapons would cause? Why did it develop detailed knowledge about blast damage, but fail to develop it about the even more devastating effects of mass fire damage? This asymmetrical government approach persisted despite the history of shocking fire damage during World War II in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Hamburg, and Dresden. Professor Eden searched for an answer in count less relevant reports and interviews carefully documented in her prodigious footnotes. Eden concludes that shortly after World War II those in the USA analyzing and predicting nuclear weapons damage concluded that fire damage involved too many variables to allow prediction. The relevant agencies remained committed to this conclusion for reasons Eden takes pains to explain. Yet I find also persuasive a reason that she does not emphasize. In a subordinated section of her book, she asks if most of the military and the Pentagon civilians responsible for predicting nuclear bomb damage ig nored fire because they found the effects too horrible to contemplate. Or to put it differently, did the US government's announced policy of precision bombing of military and industrial targets and its emphasis upon blast damage make nuclear war more acceptable to those who would wage war and to the public? Eden does acknowledge, 'After World War II, U.S. war planners did not want to think of nuclear weapons as incendiary weapons and therefore did not attend to the problem of developing a methodology to predict fire damage from them' (p. 46). On the other hand, I can imagine that many of the military and civilians analyzing the effect of nuclear weapons may have been mainly concerned about moral repugnance on the part of the citizenry. If in formed about fire damage, it might have effectively opposed the build up of nuclear weapons during the Cold War out of fear of reprisals.

In 2003 the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans employed a hypothesis-based methodology to deliver the now discredited intelligence that justified the Iraq war. The 1976 ‘Team B’, which was also heavily influenced by neoconservatives and used the same methodology, has been recognized as a precedent. There is, however, another precedent, the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission, which challenged CIA predictions on the ballistic missile threat to the US. Lobbied for by many of the same conservatives and neoconservatives, the Commission used the same analytical style as Team B and the OSP. The now discredited intelligence on Iraq was not a ‘failure’ or ‘mistake’, but a method, tried and tested by the right, of challenging the CIA on political grounds.

Bulosan has also been co-opted and taken for granted. Since the sixties, when Filipinos struggling for civil rights and against the Vietnam War discovered Bulosan, the author of America Is in the Heart has become institutionalized as a harmless ethnic icon. Notwithstanding this, I have met Filipino college students today who have no idea who Bulosan is and don't care. Obviously, times have changed; indeed, circumstances, not ideas, largely determine attitudes, choices, inclinations. The current war on what Washington and the Pentagon regard as foes of democracy and freedom, just like the war against Japanese militarism in World War II that compelled Filipino migrant workers to join the U.S. military, is already repeating that call for unity with the neocolonial masters, for suspending antagonisms, rendering Bulosan's cry for equality and justice superfluous.

Much that has been written on evangelicals in the United States concerns their impact on domestic politics. But the election of George W. Bush has resulted in a new importance for the relationship between evangelicals and US foreign policy. This has become particularly clear following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Three issues deserve further study. One is evangelicals’ attitude to Islam. The second involves the relationship between evangelicals and Israel. The third concerns the stance of evangelicals towards war with Iraq. Through an examination of these three issues, Durham explores a number of important ­questions, ranging from the relationship of evangelicals’ theology and their politics to their partly supportive, partly critical attitude towards an administration itself led by an evangelical. Many evangelicals see the ‘war against terror’ as a war against Islam and unreservedly approve of Israeli policy, and many supported the launch of war in Iraq. Yet e...

In November 1950, Defense Secretary George C. Marshall announced the appointment of Anna M. Rosenberg as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower. Apart from the startling fact that he had chosen a woman, Mrs. Rosenberg was also an immigrant, Jewish, and an ardent supporter of the New Deal. This article is about Rosenberg's career, her uncanny ability to solve problems, and the events that propelled her into the Pentagon. It is also about a woman who eschewed the feminine networks to hang her hat with men of power. Looking beyond her politics and gender, Marshall's choice was a brilliant one.

In the spring of 2002, columnist William Pfaff contrasted what he saw as Americans' over-reaction to the events of September 11,2001, with their steadfast behaviour during the Cold War. Despite the Soviet challenge and the threat of thermonuclear war, he asserted, "There was never much anxiety in the United States about future events, or fear of enemy attack, during the Cold War ... ." But Pfaff s memory seemed to have failed him, for at least one major Cold War episode did evoke fear of physical attack and doubts about national survival. Ironically, it was not a military action that triggered it but rather an ostensibly peaceful, scientific demonstration. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first earth satellite, dubbed "Sputnik," and thereby aroused both an immediate panic and a longer-range reassessment of America's character, goals, and pur- poses, both reminiscent of and intriguingly different from the coun- try's reaction to the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Mine Okubo would have grimly enjoyed this irony: that I am composing a memorial to her at the same historical moment as the United States is mourning the deaths of around 3,000 Americans and other nationals in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon. For, as numerous commentators have repeated, September 11, 2001 shares parallels with December 7, 1941, a day "that will live in infamy," when the Japanese Airforce attacked Pearl Harbor and pulled the U.S. into the Pacific War.

Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennauit Affair, and the Origins of Watergate Ken Hughes. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014.In Chasing Shadows, Ken Hughes links Watergate to the October 1968 bombing halt and the start of peace talks to end the Vietnam War. After a careful review of the Nixon tapes, Hughes cites Anna Chennauit, a member of the China lobby, and Tom Charles Huston, the head of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), as key figures in the events of 1968 and 1972. Their roles were instrumental in setting up the controversial events. Chennauit knew the South Vietnamese Ambassador in Washington. She met with him, Nixon, and John Mitchell, Nixon's campaign chairman, in July 1968. Subsequently, she was a liaison between the campaign and Ambassador Bui Diem (4-9). Over the next three months, President Nguyen Van Thieu refused to participate in the talks unless certain demands were met. He thought he would be in a better position if Nixon were elected instead of Humphrey. He finally agreed the week before the November election, but it was too late for Humphrey.President Johnson had worked on arranging a bombing halt and peace talks throughout 1968. Johnson wanted to leave office with a peace process in place and was aware that, if he waited too long, his move would be considered a political stunt and the cause of more casualties. Johnson relied on the NS A, CIA, and the FBI for information about the South and North Vietnamese. Their reports reinforced his suspicion that Nixon was behind Thieu's delaying tactics.Johnson was reluctant to make his information public. He did not want to suggest that Nixon had interfered with an election, nor did he want to reveal his own maneuvers. He took his intelligence files and retired to Texas. After the election, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, told Nixon that he (Hoover) may have bugged his campaign plane and offices despite the FBI's refusal to do "black bag operations." Hoover also opposed Nixon's plan to set up the SIU, which, without Congressional oversight, would coordinate intelligence and carry out operations Hoover opposed.The SIU was expected to investigate leaks and became known as the "Plumbers." Nixon ordered its director, Tom Huston, to look into Johnson's file on the October bombing halt. Huston concluded that there was a special report separate from the Pentagon Papers that could be found at the Brookings Institution (70-71). Nixon feared that the release of the Pentagon Papers might also include the results of the Johnson review and ordered a break-in of the Brookings Institution to find the report, but his staff did not carry it out. Nixon did not realize that Huston had erred about the file. …

Ours is a society of documents. From the mundane (the W-9, the driver’s license application, the receipt) to the controversial or essential (the eBook, the birth certificate, the Constitution of the United States), our society is as much shaped by the documents with which we interact as those documents are shaped by our need to interact with them. In Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, author Lisa Gitelman artfully illustrates this dichotomy through the exploration of significant historical events in which the use of a document, set of documents, or genre of documents was as key to the shaping of those events as the people who utilized them. In Paper Knowledge, Gitelman endeavors to create a brief history of the ‘‘scriptural economy’’ through anecdotal examination at its most key moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the rise and standardization of job printing and blank documents, mimeographs and photocopies, and, eventually, the pdf file. With an effortless clarity, Gitelman repeatedly draws parallels between the implications of these historical moments and the similar aspects of the digital revolution as well as developments in our contemporary culture of documents and media. Gitelman’s analysis is particularly valuable in accounts of lesser known events. Most readers will be familiar with Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, and, though they may not have thought about it in the same terms, have some awareness of how the then recent proliferation of the photocopying machine made the exposure of that scandal possible. Less familiar is the story of Oscar H. Harpel and his painstakingly detailed, representative collection of job printing templates from 1870, Harpel’s

Professor Goodman analyses the failure of US intelligence prior to 9/11 setting the context in the 1980s and 1990s. He dissects the flaws of the CIA, FBI and the Pentagon. He argues that the State Department should be strengthened because its capabilities are the most important. He also recommends that the FBI be split in two and that the CIA's budget be disclosed.

The Pentagon made it clear from the beginning of the war against Iraq, writes eminent journalist and author Knightley, there would be no censorship. What it failed to say was that war correspondents might well find themselves in a situation similar to that in Korea in 1950. This was described by one American correspondent as the military saying: "You can write what you like - but if we don't like it we'll shoot you." The figures in Iraq tell a terrible story. Fifteen media people dead, with two missing presumed dead. If you consider how short the campaign was, Iraq will be notorious as the most dangerous war for journalists ever - and the most dishonest.

Claims by some commentators that "9/11" was an intelligence failure like Pearl Harbor, that the United States was unprepared for "9/11" like she was for the Japanese attack on Hawaii, and that, like Pearl Harbor, the military was not ready to defend against al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon are incorrect. On the contrary, an analysis of the two events reveals that they are more dissimilar than alike.

During October 1969 President Nixon directed the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to order the US high command to undertake military measures that would convey to Moscow the increased readiness of US nuclear forces but would not be 'threatening in themselves'. The JCS Readiness Test, as the exercise was officially known, was one of Nixon's more mysterious and secret decisions. This article tracks the twists and turns of Nixon's Vietnam strategy that led to the readiness test and details the Pentagon's subsequent though unenthusiastic efforts to carry out the president's wishes. The October 1969 nuclear alert and its accompanying 'madman' threats against Hanoi and Moscow sheds new light on Nixon's strategy of detente and the intricate connections between it, the Vietnam War, and continuing Cold War confrontation between the superpowers.

Part of the Palgrave Studies in Oral History series edited by Linda Shopes and Bruce M. Stave, Soldiers and Citizens presents a collection of oral history interviews primarily with American soldier...

On September 11, three planes flown by al-Qaeda operatives hit three important landmarks—the World Trade Center buildings in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC. By the day’s end, President George W. Bush had instructed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to develop a plan to attack al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. Less than a month after the surprise attacks, Bush ordered the initiation of Operation Enduring Freedom. Australia, the United Kingdom, and France assisted. Just a few days after the al-Qaeda attack on the United States, the president directed the secretary of defense to start thinking about ways to oust Saddam Hussein’s regime. Some eighteen months later, Bush authorized the invasion of Iraq.

In mid-October 1962, US intelligence analysts, using photographs taken a few days earlier by two U-2 aircraft flying over Cuba, determined that the Soviet Union was installing middle-range ballistic missiles (MRBM) on the island with the capability to deliver nuclear warheads. After discussing the new information with his advisors for two full days, President John F. Kennedy decided that the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba posed a direct threat to the national security of the United States and, thus, that they had to be removed. To achieve this objective, the president and his advisors narrowed their options to either launching a conventional airstrike on the missile sites followed by an invasion or implementing a naval quarantine on the delivery of offensive weapons. They agreed that were the president to authorize the set up of a blockade, shortly thereafter he might have to order the launching of an invasion followed by an air strike. On Monday, October 22, Kennedy announced on television that he had ordered the US Navy to set up a quarantine around Cuba and had called the premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, to ask him to “halt and eliminate [the] clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.” That same day, Kennedy authorized the Pentagon to redeploy US military forces toward the southern parts of the United States in preparation for a direct attack on the Cuban island in case Moscow were not to act as he had insisted. Fourteen days after the discovery of the Soviet missiles, the crisis ended.

What 12/7 Has to Teach about 9/11: Race MattersThe terrorist attacks on 9-11 have frequently been analogized to Pearl Harbor. In many ways, the analogy is apt. Just as that attack launched us into World War II, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have launched us into a new kind of war, against terrorism. But waging this sort of borderless war poses great risks, not only to the soldiers commanded to fight but also to core American values. In this way, Pearl Harbor raises other disturbing memories, those of the internment.

In March 1948, Sir Percy Sillitoe, Director-General of M15, flew to Australia to inform its Prime Minister, J.B. Chifley, that a spy ring had been detected operating out of the Soviet embassy in Canberra. The details Sillitoe produced were vague and no suspect could be arrested. Then chaos broke out. The Pentagon banned all information flowing to Australia: Australian/British/US relations became strained: the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) was established under the aegis of M15, but it failed to placate the USA; and the Chifley government lost the subsequent elections. What was behind these espionage sensations? The defection of the KGB man in Canberra, Vladimir Petrov, in 1954 was expected to produce the insider's exposé on local spying and although suspected spies were paraded, nothing happened. Then in 1996, everything was made clear. The US National Security Agency (NSA) released the Australian Venona papers, comprising the decrypted Soviet cables detailing the operation of this 1940s spy ring. They had been sealed in the NSA's most secret archives for 50 years to avoid compromising all Sigint (Signal intelligence) work. The exploration of these events by Australian historians has hitherto been handicapped by a lack of knowledge about the detail of this missing intelligence dimension. The revealing of that secret now provides the opportunity for these disjointed events to be viewed in their proper Cold War perspective. This article analyses the events from the aspect of what was known before the Venona releases and what can now be known of those same events.

Contrary to assertions equating the post-Keynesian state with a militarized economy, the closure of US military facilities in the 1990s reveals a fluid, highly contingent politic dynamic that profoundly affects the landscape of military expenditures. This paper opens with a refutation of interpretations that equate post-Keynesianism with militarism. Next, it examines the geopolitics surrounding closures of military facilities, including Pentagon motivations and the sources of local opposition. Third, it turns to the geoeconomics of base closures: using input-output analysis, it estimates the total impacts by state attributable to the 1988, 1991 and 1993 waves of closures. Finally, it points to the fruits of alternative uses of such sing military conversion.

I was waking up in the sunny California morning on September 11 , 2001. Instead of music playing on my radio alarm clock, I was hearing fragments of news broadcast about airplanes crashing into the Pentagon and the twin towers of the World Trade Center. I thought I was dreaming about waking up in an alternative universe.

Chapter 21 deals with the myth that it won’t happen to me. The reality is that belief a dust explosion will not happen in a given facility handling combustible powders is rooted in an inadequate safety culture. The end result of such a belief is inevitably the very thing it denies—a dust explosion.

This article takes a fresh look at Anglo-American nuclear relations between 1946 and 1958. It concentrates on the relationship between the military establishments of the two countries in general and the ties between the United States air force and the Royal Air Force in particular. The article argues that an understanding of military relations is essential for an understanding of the high politics of the nuclear relationship. It is shown that senior officers in the armed services were the main ‘functional elite’ dealing with nuclear delivery systems and the planning for their use. Relations between these groups were personally and institutionally close and on the whole cordial. In Britain the link sustained optimism about the possibility of close nuclear co-operation in the 1940s and early 1950s and suppressed fears about the loss of nuclear independence in the late 1950s. In the United States it was recognized that military relations were an important channel through which to influence British nuclear policy. The article offers accounts, based on new archival research, of the nuclear aspect of the October 1947 Pentagon talks on the Middle East, Churchill's visit to the United States in January 1952 and the first Anglo-American joint nuclear targeting agreement – the Wilson/Alexander agreement of 12 March 1954. It reveals for the first time details of Plans E and X which equipped the RAF with American atomic and thermonuclear weapons between 1955 and 1958. The article concludes that the British nuclear force was becoming subordinated to the United States even before negotiations about Thor, Skybolt and Polaris missiles became central to the relationship.

Whether tied around a tree, worn on a lapel or displayed in some other fashion, the yellow ribbon in America became a pervasive visible symbol associated with the Gulf War. It generated incredible sales, unprecedented usage and heated debate.Few symbols in recent times have been so quickly embraced by so many segments of society. Yellow ribbons cut across economic, religious, political, social, gender, regional, age and professional barriers. Military families used them, but so did individuals who had no relatives in the military. Politicians, companies, churches, retail businesses, advertisers, municipalities, school children and advocates on both sides of the war issue used them.Yellow ribbons were everywhere. Their presence across both rural and urban America before, during and after the war makes it hard to imagine that most Americans did not encounter them in some fashion. Few could escape seeing ribbons decorating something, reading references to them in newspapers and finding them for sale in stores and displayed on clothing and jewelry. No war in recent American history has seen a home front phenomenon of this type.This article examines the ribbon variants and sales, phases of utilization, widespread use and visibility, ambiguous meanings and controversies that surrounded its' use, and speculates on why it was so popular and the functional roles it played in the lives of the people and communities who displayed it.The Gulf War was neither the first nor the last time that yellow ribbons have been selected by individuals and groups to symbolize support for a cause or to welcome back loved ones. Since 1979, several different groups concerned with the release of Middle East hostages had popularized the ribbon as a symbol for their cause. And extending beyond the hostage context, yellow ribbons were worn in 1985 by non-striking United Airlines flight attendants and pilots to support striking colleagues who were considered held "hostage" by the company ("United" A5). And while not entirely yellow, a ribbon was symbolically tied around the Pentagon in August 1985, the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Composed of thousands of individually stitched banners, at least one of which had a yellow ribbon encircling the earth, the Pentagon ribbon supported peace and called for an end to nuclear weapons (Lark ). In 1988 pro-timber industry workers in the Pacific Northwest formed the Yellow Ribbon Coalition to promote an understanding of their cause--saving their jobs and rural lifestyle from being eliminated as forests become increasingly protected to preserve the habitat of the endangered northern spotted owl. Convoys of 1000 ribbon-decorated log trucks have rallied in Northwest cities, members have tied ribbons to trees and car antennas and have appropriated the ribbon as their solidarity symbol (Strycker 1A, McKenzie C1). In February 1992, several hundred Oregon timber workers wearing yellow ribbons chanted "Hey, Hey ESA, please don't take our jobs away," as they came to testify at government hearings on the Endangered Species Act (Durbin A1). Supporters of alleged Mafia leader John Gotti hung yellow ribbons outside his former social club during his Winter 1992 trial (Maykuth E15). While none of these instances reached the same proportion of use as was evident during the Gulf War, together they illustrate that the yellow ribbon had become fairly well disseminated as a support symbol across America by the early 1990s.RIBBON VARIANTS AND SALESDuring the Gulf War the yellow ribbon took many forms. In its most common manifestation, it appeared as a yellow plastic or fabric bow, streamer, banner or strip of ribbon, of varying widths and lengths, that was tied, pinned, folded, wrapped, draped, hung, glued or otherwise attached to or encircled around something else. One of the most common of all yellow ribbon usages was the tying of a bow around a trunk of a tree (Fig. 1). (Fig. …

Never before has there been a war of such scope so scantily recorded. In the Persian Gulf, considerations of security overrode those of informed consent. Recording reality cannot guarantee that wars won't be undertaken again, but that they won't be undertaken in ignorance.

Was the Kennedy administration moving toward a military attack on Cuba in the fall of 1962, even before it discovered Soviet strategic missiles on the island? Recently declassified evidence and fresh controversy compel a new look at this infrequently examined question. While not offering a definitive answer, this chapter presents new information, interpretations and hypotheses regarding U.S. behavior in the period leading up to the Cuban missile crisis. It is now clear that throughout the first ten months of 1962, Operation Mongoose, the Kennedy administration’s secret program of covert operations against Cuba, was closely coordinated with enhanced Pentagon contingency planning for possible U.S. military intervention to bring about Castro’s downfall. During this period, U.S. officials actively considered the option of sparking an internal revolt in Cuba that would serve as a pretext for open, direct military action. Top officials in the U.S. government initially “shied away from” the idea of overt military involvement in Cuba prior to the missile crisis. But the Pentagon, acting at the direction of the president and the secretary of defense, dramatically accelerated contingency planning for military action against Cuba in late September and early October 1962, just as the president was ordering a sharp increase in anti-Castro covert operations. Although the ultimate purpose of these intensified military preparations remains unclear, the possibility that, under domestic political pressure and even before they learned in mid-October that Soviet nuclear-capable missiles were in Cuba, top U.S. policymakers seriously considered conventional military action—including, if necessary, a full-scale invasion—to overthrow the Castro regime, has to be considered.

Most of the essential facts concerning the events of 11 September 2001 will be all too familiar to anyone likely to be reading this work: approaching 3,000 people died after four airliners were hijacked. Two airliners were deliberately piloted into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and one into part of the Pentagon in Washington. The fourth airliner, following resistance from the passengers, crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside. Its intended destination is still a matter for conjecture but either the White House or the US Capitol in Washington are considered the most likely. There were 19 direct perpetrators. From the outset it was known that those bent on thus committing suicide were of Middle Eastern origin, for they had thoughtfully allowed their intended victims on the airliners to make telephone calls. And soon the US Government was able to confidently indicate that al-Qaeda in general and bin Laden in particular held ultimate responsibility.1

In the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the spontaneous invocation and rapid popular acceptance of this freighted term mark a specific and potent return of repressed American history. While no critic or analyst has directly confronted this return, the genealogy of the term makes clear that the civilian victims and spectacular destruction of “9/11” triggered an unconscious discursive reenactment of the problem of U.S. guilt for the 300,000, mostly noncombatant victims of the first use of nuclear weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.