Self-Interest versus the Common Cause: Austria,Prussia and Russia against Napoleon

This essay re-examines coalition warfare during the Napoleonic era by looking at the three eastern European powers – Austria, Prussia and Russia – how they interacted over time with France as well as each other, and how they managed French preponderance on the Continent. Before 1812, coalition warfare was dominated by eighteenth-century military and diplomatic attitudes: overall foreign political goals were ill-defined and were characterised by deep mistrust. The result was that the eastern powers pursued their own interests with little regard to coalition cohesion. If the coalition held together in 1813 and 1814, on the other hand, it was largely because individual powers' self-interest coincided with the overall objectives of the coalition – an increased determination to defeat Napoleon – along with a never before seen numerical superiority in allied troops. In this, Austria and especially Chancellor Metternich's role in juggling conflicting interests between the allies so that they could present, for the first time, a united front against France was fundamental.     

‘A fly in outer space’: Soviet ballistic missile defence during the Khrushchev period

Although the Soviet missile defence effort was begun to protect the USSR from attack by nuclear missiles, Khrushchev was quick to see its political value, and used the prospect of an anti‐ballistic missile system to emphasize Soviet technological superiority. Within the Soviet armed forces there was widespread consensus about the importance of ABM's damage‐limiting role. The debates about strategy for future war in Soviet military publications demonstrate that support in the armed forces for an ABM capability transcended service loyalties and remained remarkably strong even after 1962, when technical problems and an effort to improve relations with the US following the Cuban Missile Crisis meant that the missile defence project no longer enjoyed the public backing of senior Party and military figures.     

Book reviews

Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of “Ethnic Cleansing”. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. Pp.xiv + 247; app., map, notes, cartoon.

Maria Jose Moyano, Argentina's Lost Patrol: Armed Struggle, 1969–1979. New Haven: Connecticut Yale University Press, 1995. Pp.xiii + 226, biblio., abbreviations, 10 figures, 1 map, tables, index; $25/£16.95. ISBN 0–300–01622–6.

Donald E. Schulz and Deborah Sundloff Schulz, The United States, Honduras, and the Crisis in Central America, Westview Thematic Studies in Latin America, Boulder, Co: Westview, 1994. Pp.368, map, figure, select biblio., abbreviations, index. $52.50/£37.50; (cloth) $17.95/£11.95 (paper). ISBN 0–8133–1324–4 and 1323–6.

Joseph H. Alexander and Merrill L. Bartlett, Sea Soldiers in the Cold War: Amphibious Warfare 1945–1991. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1995. Pp.iii + 178, 1 map, 29 illus, biblio, index. $32.95. ISBN

Gary P. Cox, The Halt in the Mud: French Strategic Planning from Waterloo to Sedan. Westview Press, 1994. Pp.258, maps, notes, biblio, index. £33.50. ISBN 0–133–1536–0.     

On a generalized bin-packing problem

In this paper we address a bin-packing problem which possesses a variety of modifications of the classic theme. Among these are bin-dependent chip weights, bin costs, and bin-dependent penalties for unused capacity. Lagrangian relaxations are employed in the context of a branch-and-bound framework in order to solve the problem after which substantial computational experience is provided.     

Time minimizing flows in directed networks

An important class of network flow problems is that class for which the objective is to minimize the cost of the most expensive unit of flow while obtaining a desired total flow through the network. Two special cases of this problem have been solved, namely, the bottleneck assignment problem and time-minimizing transportation problem. This paper addresses the more general case which we shall refer to as the time-minimizing network flow problem. Associated with each arc is an arc capacity (static) and a transferral time. The objective is to find a maximal flow for which the length (in time) of the longest path carrying flow is minimized. The character of the problem is discussed and a solution algorithm is presented.