Bedeviled by a Paradox: Nitze,Bundy, and an Incipient Nuclear Norm

ABSTRACT

This article explores how two influential American policy makers—Paul Nitze and McGeorge Bundy—wrestled with the idea of a norm against the use of nuclear weapons. Existing scholarship has overlooked how both Bundy and Nitze came to understand the idea of nuclear non-use, especially related to the credibility of threats to use nuclear weapons. Using documentary evidence from their personal papers, this article illuminates the thinking of Bundy and Nitze, finding that both engaged with the idea of a norm of non-use of nuclear weapons in their strategic writing and thought.     

海上维权斗争舆论战对策思考

舆论战作为信息时代一种独立而重要的作战样式,是一种渗透力、攻击力、威慑力很强的特殊武器,是海上维权斗争行动的重要组成部分.文章对开展海上雏权斗争舆论战的紧迫性进行了分析,归纳总结了海上维权斗争舆论战的特点,探索了开展海上维权斗争舆论战的对策.     

ON ETHNIC CONFLICT AND THE ORIGINS OF TRANSNATIONAL TERRORISM

Using the ITERATE dataset, we explore the origins of transnational terrorist activity, from 1982 through 1997, in 118 countries. We model terrorism, not as a function of a nation’s ethnic, religious or linguistic fractionalization, but as an independent measure of perceived ethnic tensions. When we control for institutional quality, evidence that political rights and civil liberties mitigate the terrorism‐producing effects of ethnic tensions exists only since 1990. Economic freedoms, on the other hand, robustly reduce the number of terrorist attacks originating in ethnically tense societies.     

Comment: Why “an identified systemic model of the democracy‐peace nexus” does not persuade*

In their article in this journal, James, Solberg and Wolfson (1999) challenge our findings that two states are more likely to have peaceful relations if they are both democratic. They claim to develop a simultaneous system of two equations showing that peace and democracy foster each other, and that the effect of peace in encouraging democracy is stronger than that of democracy on peace. Their analysis, however, is flawed. Their research design employs measures of dispute and joint democracy that are inferior to those now common in the literature, and their equation for predicting peace is not properly specified. These problems distort their results. Even so, their results provide evidence of the pacific benefits of democracy. Analyses we conduct with a more completely specified model reveal stronger support for the democratic “ peace. Furthermore, a test of the effect of interstate conflict on democracy should be done at the national (or monadic) level of analysis; but James et al. perform a dyadic analysis. In a monadic test using vector autoregression, we find that disputes make no contribution to explaining the character of regimes. Even with their dyadic method, their finding that peace promotes democracy is not robust Including a crucial control variable, the ratio of militarily relevant national capabilities, that James et al. omitted, dramatically alters their findings.     

An informal framework to aid the analysis and design of military posture

The design of military posture is an exercise in confronting potential enemies’ capabilities within the context of geographic, technological, temporal, political and economic constraints. No formal model is capable of encapsulating the essentials of so complex an environment for closed or simulated analysis, but it is useful to have an informal framework within which to reason interactively within these dimensions.

This paper presents such a scaffolding, patterned on the notion of a military posture as the output of an economic process whose structure reflects important determinants of the characteristics and extents of weaponry and expenditures that are appropriate to the environment within the feasibility set determined by the constraints. The analysis remains at an abstract level, but it does highlight the important shifts toward preparation for littoral warfare, greater reliance on reserve rather than active forces, and necessary changes in missions among military departments.     

The Tower at War 1914–18: Foreman Buckingham Goes To War

Abstract

A small part of the White Tower displays at the Royal Armouries at the Tower is marking the centenary of the First World War and the role the Tower of London played in the War, the links between the site, its staff and the great event are described. The importance of Charles ffoulkes as curator in developing the collection is emphasized. The choice of display content and the way the exhibition will change to reflect each year of the war is described, starting with material from 1914 displayed during 2014 in ‘Foreman Buckingham goes to war’.     

From Civil War Victor to Cold War Guard: Positional Warfare in Korea and the Transformation of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, 1951–1953

This article analyses the impact of the Korean War on the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), particularly the period of positional warfare from 1951 to 1953. In the war of movement between October 1950 and June 1951, the PLA relied on its civil war era weapons and experience, including the doctrine of ‘battle of annihilation’. Operations in early 1951 suggested that the civil war legacies of the PLA no longer applied to the realities of combat in Korea. Based on both Soviet aid and domestic mobilisation, the PLA managed to build the material foundation for positional warfare and rapidly improved its logistics. Operationally, on the defensive, the PLA developed combined operations integrating infantry, artillery, and armoured forces. The PLA learned the lessons of the Korean War and strengthened its ties with the Soviet armed forces in order to modernise itself. The Korean War thus transformed the PLA from Civil War victor to Cold War guard.     

《孙子兵法》谋略思想在反劫持战斗中的运用

用兵作战是一种诡诈之术。“诡道”“奇袭”“利诱”交织而成的战略思想贯穿孙子兵法思想的始终。它们是战斗克敌制胜的法宝。研究借鉴并灵活运用孙子谋略思想,对提高武警部队反劫持战斗行动能力,具有十分重要的现实意义。