The Hydrogen Bomb,Lewis L. Strauss and the Writing of Nuclear History

In January 1950 President Harry S. Truman announced that the United States would proceed with further work to determine the feasibility of a ‘Super’, or hydrogen, bomb. The events leading up to that decision – counter-pressures and advocacy from a number of quarters, including the divided Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the nuclear scientists, Congress and the Pentagon – is well known. Less attention has been given to how the story of the Super came to be told in official and popular publications. Admiral Lewis L. Strauss, rogue member of the AEC, later presidential adviser on atomic affairs and AEC chairman, was one of the most vigorous advocates of developing thermonuclear weapons. He was also a highly skilled player of bureaucratic politics. This article draws upon the Strauss archives to examine how he used his position and his contacts to shape the history of the H-bomb to his own political advantage.     

Allocation of carrier-based attack aircraft using non-linear programming

The paper presents the formulation and several solutions of a model for allocating a fixed number of aircraft to carriers and to missions. The amount of damage that can be inflicted is maximized. A nonseparable concave nonlinear objective function expresses diminishing marginal damage. Linear constraints on aireraft, carrier space, and aircraft availability for missions are included. The model is solved using the sequential unconstrained minimization technique (SUMT). The model is presented in terms of a scenario. Several different exponential damage functions are treated, and S-shaped damage functions are discussed.     

Does Military Spending Really Matter for Economic Growth in China and G7 Countries: The Roles of Dependency and Heterogeneity

This study revisits the causal linkages between military spending and economic growth in China and G7 countries (i.e. Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the USA) by focusing country-specific analysis for the period 1988–2010. The panel causality analysis, which accounts for both cross-country dependency and heterogeneity across countries, is employed in this study. Our results find evidence of the neutrality hypothesis for Italy, France, and Germany, the military spending–growth detriment hypothesis for both Canada and the UK, and one-way Granger causality running from economic growth to military spending for China. Furthermore, we find a feedback between military spending and economic growth in both Japan and the USA. Thus, our results do not support that one size fits all.     

The Royal Navy's Polaris lobby, 1955–62

This article examines the background to the Royal Navy's acquisition of Polaris. The conventional wisdom is that the Navy had little interest in Polaris, which was foisted on it upon the cancellation of Skybolt. Extensive use of files in the Public Record Office is made to mount the contrary argument, that the Admiralty had been interested in the submarine-launched ballistic missile since at least 1955, that there was widespread support for it among the Naval Staff, that a substantial amount of preparatory work was undertaken with the assistance of the US Navy, and that the naval staff were prepared to accept the deterrent role. Naval tactics – to play a waiting game and feign indifference – have contributed to the establishment of the orthodox interpretation, as has the view that the Navy was handicapped by the lack of a body of doctrine within which the deterrent role could be accommodated. The article shows that the orthodox account cannot be sustained by the evidence, which points to a naval triumph in terms of Whitehall politics and inter-service competition.     

Research and development on hypervelocity impact protection using Whipple shield: An overview

Whipple shield, a dual-wall system, as well as its improved structures, is widely applied to defend the hypervelocity impact of space debris (projectile). This paper reviews the studies about the mechanism and process of protection against hypervelocity impacts using Whipple shield. Ground-based experiment and numerical simulation for hypervelocity impact and protection are introduced briefly. Three steps of the Whipple shield protection are discussed in order, including the interaction between the projectile and bumper, the movement and diffusion of the debris cloud, and the interaction between the debris cloud and rear plate. Potential improvements of the protection performance focusing on these three steps are presented. Representative works in the last decade are mentioned specifically. Some prospects and suggestions for future studies are put forward.     

Markovian models of three‐on‐one combat involving a hidden defender

In this paper, Markovian models of three‐on‐one stochastic firefights between ground‐based weapon systems are developed. These models address a common scenario of interest to the military, but one which has been much neglected in analytic combat models, that of combat between a hidden defender and an exposed attacking force. Each combatant must detect an opponent before commencing their firing cycle, a task which is considerably more difficult for the attacker. In the models developed here, the defender detects the exposed attacking group after an exponentially distributed time interval, while each attacker has a fixed probability of detecting the defender via the flash signature produced after each shot fired by him. The utility of the approach is demonstrated by investigating what impact the introduction of a coordinated gun‐laying system for the attacking force might have, a system made possible by battlefield digitization. The method used here allows models to be developed incrementally. This and other advantages of the Markovian approach are discussed. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 49: 627–646, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/nav.10041