The 1958 Anglo-American Mutual Defence Agreement: The Search for Nuclear Interdependence

Written on the 50th anniversary, this article focuses on the negotiations between Britain and the United States which led to the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement and the beginning of the ‘special nuclear relationship’ which has lasted down to the present day. It is argued that the eventual success of the negotiations had a lot to do with the key roles of Eisenhower and Macmillan but that a transatlantic ‘advocacy coaltion’ of nuclear scientists, defence and intelligence officials also played an important part at the operational level in achieving and subsequently shaping the kind of relationship which developed. Attention is also given to the longer term significance of the agreement, especially in terms of the arguments about its impact on nuclear proliferation.     

Landmarks in defense literature

SOE in France: An Account of the Work of the Special Operations Executive in France 1940-1944. By M. R. D. FOOT. Her Majesty' Stationary Office, London, 550 pp., 1966. Second impression with amendments 1986.     

Surrogate duality in a branch-and-bound procedure

Recent research has led to several surrogate multiplier search procedures for use in a primal branch-and-bound procedure. As single constrained integer programming problems, the surrogate subproblems are also solved via branch-and-bound. This paper develops the inner play between the surrogate subproblem and the primal branch-and-bound trees which can be exploited to produce a number of computational efficiencies. Most important is a restarting procedure which precludes the need to solve numerous surrogate subproblems at each node of a primal branch-and-bound tree. Empirical evidence suggests that this procedure greatly reduces total computation time.     

An algorithm for maximizing target achievement in the stochastic knapsack problem with normal returns

We consider the stochastic linear knapsack problem in which costs are known with certainty but returns are independent, normally distributed random variables. The objective is to maximize the probability that the overall return equals or exceeds a specified target value. A previously proposed preference order dynamic programming-based algorithm has been shown to be potentially suboptimal. We offer an alternative hybrid DP/branch-and-bound algorithm that both guarantees optimality and significantly outperforms generating the set of Pareto optimal returns.© 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The First Carlist War (1833–40), insurgency,Ramón Cabrera,and expeditionary warfare

ABSTRACT

The period 1833 to 1840 witnessed a brutal civil war in Spain waged between insurgent Carlists and the government Cristinos. The Carlists managed to secure reliable territorial control only over one part of Spain (upland Navarra and rural parts of the neighbouring Basque provinces). Although pockets of armed Carlism flourished elsewhere in Spain, especially in Catalonia, Aragón and Galicia, these insurgents were ineffective at coordinating actions. The Carlist court in the Basque country tried to break its strategic blockade by launching a series of expeditions into Cristino-held territory in the hope of destabilising the Madrid regime and consolidating distant insurrections. This article explains how and why these expeditions scored tactical victories but strategic failures. In particular it argues that Carlist raiding strategy was a failure, for its use of violence against real and imagined enemies in marginal and Cristino areas of control alienated civilian support.