Denuclearization on NATO's Southern Front: Allied Reactions to Soviet Proposals, 1957–1963

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 197-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lykourgos Kourkouvelas
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cuban Missile Crisis ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
East European ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Missiles

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Union and its East European allies sought to prevent the installation of U.S. nuclear missiles in Western Europe by embarking on a diplomatic “peace offensive” that included proposals for the creation of denuclearized zones in various geographical areas of Europe. This article considers how the NATO countries responded to these proposals. In the end, the Western allies rejected proposals for the denuclearization of the Balkans and other areas in Europe, but discussions within NATO's councils often proved complicated, especially regarding southern Europe. In the case of the 1957 Stoica proposal for the denuclearization of the Balkans, the leading NATO countries stepped back and let Turkey and Greece reject the proposal, but by 1963, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, the United States and other key allied countries as well as the NATO bureaucracy assumed a more active role in evaluating and ultimately rejecting the notion of denuclearization in the Mediterranean.

Conflict and Cooperation in Intra-Alliance Nuclear Politics: Western Europe, the United States, and the Genesis of NATO's Dual-Track Decision, 1977–1979

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Spohr Readman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Conflict And Cooperation ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Missiles ◽  
East West

On the basis of recently released archival sources from several member-states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), this article revisits the making of NATO's landmark 1979 dual-track decision. The article examines the intersecting processes of personal, bureaucratic, national, and alliance high politics in the broader Cold War context of increasingly adversarial East-West relations. The discussion sheds new light on how NATO tried to augment its deterrent capability via the deployment of long-range theater nuclear missiles and why ultimately an arms control proposal to the Soviet Union was included as an equal strand. The 1979 decision owed most to West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's political thought and initiative. Intra-alliance decision-making, marked by transatlantic conflict and cooperation, benefitted from the creativity and agency of West German, British, and Norwegian officials. Contrary to popular impressions, the United States did not truly lead the process.

From Nuclear Winter to the Anthropocene

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eglė Rindzevičiūtė
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Computer Models ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Missiles ◽  
Nuclear Winter

This chapter looks at the nuclear winter project, an outcome of global modeling. The idea that the Earth could be plunged into a “nuclear winter” as the catastrophic outcome of a nuclear war was announced by a group of leading climate and environment scientists from the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union shortly after Ronald Reagan delivered his “Star Wars” speech in March 1983. Drawing on experiments with data-based computer models, these scholars claimed that a nuclear war, unlike the two world wars, would be not simply a regional, but a truly global disaster. Nuclear missiles, detonated over urban areas, would ignite massive fire storms, which in turn would propel soot particles and aerosols into high levels of the atmosphere. As a result, the computer models predicted, a dust shield would emerge that would be transported by air currents to both the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Geographies of media and power

2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inka Salovaara-Moring ◽  
Kirsi Maunula
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
American Values ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Ideological Space ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Nuclear Missiles

•This article explores the representation of the United States in Finnish daily newspapers, 1984—2009. Empirically, it builds on an analysis of editorials and commentaries that focus on US foreign policy. The examples deal with the deployment of US nuclear missiles to Europe in 1984, the Balkans war in 1994, the continuation of the war in Iraq in 2004, and the Cairo speech of newly elected President Barack Obama in 2009. Theoretically, the article reflects on discourses through the geographies of power politics and identity organized by the media of the small borderland country, Finland, at the ideological, economic and cultural-interactional levels. The focal questions are how the frontiers and contours of the evolving geopolitical positions of the United States were articulated, and how territorial units were defined in the spatial and symbolic practices of the commentators. In these discourses, ‘USA’ is constructed through three successive narratives: (a) as a ‘superpower’ in relation to the Soviet Union/Europe, in which new identities are depicted as part of differing positions in power geographies; (b) ‘America’ as an ideological space where the main organizing principles are ‘American’ values and moralities in relation to changing economic and political geographies; and (c) a territorial order of geo-economy in which the USA is represented as the engine of capitalism with its economic superiority highlighted. •

United States Policy Towards Eastern Europe: Before and After Helsinki

1975 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert F. Byrnes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Before And After ◽  
And Control

The signing in Helsinki of the agreement on security and cooperation in Europe has led to bitter criticism of President Ford and of the policy under which the United States drifted into recognizing Soviet acquisition of 114,000 square miles of Finnish, Polish, German, Czechoslovak, and Romanian territory, apparently sanctified as well Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and recognized the “permanent” division of Europe. In return for endorsing these Soviet conquests, the Western states received some vague promises that the Soviet Union and the East European states would take a “positive and humanitarian attitude” towards applications from their citizens to rejoin their families in the West, would “facilitate the improvement of the dissemination” of publications from other countries, would provide three weeks' notice of large military maneuvers within 156 miles of frontiers, and assured that every European state would be free from “external influence.” All these phrases seem small recompense for such great concessions and from two years of negotiation by 492 diplomats, especially when hope in Western Europe in particular had been high for an end to jamming, censorship, and control over travel. Critics noted in particular that the formal summit agreement awarded the Soviet Union prizes it had sought since 1954, while the parallel discussion of reducing military forces in Eastern and Western Europe, in which the Soviet Union and its associates maintain immense superiorities, has long been stalled. Indeed, now that the West no longer has the lever of the Geneva talks, it has little pressure to persuade the Soviet Union to discuss mutual balanced force reductions. Many now fear that the Soviet Union will press instead for a collective security agreement, which would have no meaning, but which would totally demolish NATO, while leaving the Soviets on the commanding military heights in Eastern Europe.

„Socialist postmodernism”: residential architecture in Kyiv Podil district (Ukraine)

BUILDER ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 293 (12) ◽  
pp. 46-51
Author(s):  
Svitlana Linda
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Construction Projects ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Residential Architecture ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Residential Quarters

Despite the short chronological span of the socialist era architecture heritage, it remains little investigated and underappreciated. Given the political and cultural isolation of the Soviet Union republics and strict architectural design regulations, there was a widespread belief that architects should not use innovative trends. This article exemplifies residential quarters in the historic Podil district, designed and built in the 1970s-1980s in Kyiv. They vividly demonstrate the postmodern ideas embodied in Ukrainian architecture. Methodologically, the article bases on the Ch. Jencks definition of postmodernism and in the comparison of his ideology with the implemented Kyiv project. It states that Kyiv architects proposed not typical Soviet construction projects but international postmodern architectural solutions. It proves that, on the one hand, Ukrainian architects had perfect qualifications to draw construction projects implementing advanced world trends of the time. But on the other hand, it highlights that postmodernism in architecture did not merely confine to Western Europe and the United States but also penetrated the Iron Curtain, exemplifying innovative architectural thinking which ran contrary to the modernist paradigm.

6. Maintaining the Spheres of Influence

2020 ◽  
pp. 159-177
Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spheres Of Influence ◽  
Nikita Khrushchev ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This chapter examines how the United States and the Soviet Union tried to maintain their respective spheres of influence during the Cold War, especially in three regions: Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Latin America. The death of Joseph Stalin and the assumption of power by the triumvirate of Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, and Georgi Malenkov resulted in a fresh approach to domestic issues and to the nature of Soviet control over its European satellites. The apparent change produced a new Soviet approach to East–West relations. The chapter first considers how the new Soviet leadership addressed the crisis in East Germany before analysing American influence in Western Europe and US relations with Latin America. The discussion covers themes and events such as the Soviet policy on Hungary and Poland, the Messina Conference and the Spaak Committee, nuclear cooperation and multilateral force, and the US response to the Cuban Revolution.

The Rise and Decline of NATO

Worldview ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
William Pfaff
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union

NATO was born of a crisis, and its trouble today results from the fact that the crisis is gone. The ruins of war have been cleared away. The drama of 1949—of a clash between Germany's conquerorshas faded. The ambition of the Soviet Union to dominate Western Europe undoubtedly still exists, but it is a passive threat, a latent threat which no longer has in it an immediacy and power sufficient to compel great measures of defense, The states of Western Europe are no longer the unconfldent nations they were in the last years of the 1940's; they no longer need rely upon the United States to defend them from the Soviet Union; and the Soviet Union is no longer quite the bizarre society it was in those years of menace.

Nikolai Rubakin’s Library for Revolutionaries

Slavic Review ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 554-559
Author(s):  
Alfred Erich Senn
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
European Studies ◽  
The West ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union

For almost forty years the private library of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rubakin, located first in Baugy-sur-Clarens and subsequently in Lausanne, Switzerland, served as a major fund of Russian books in Western Europe, and it attracted many of the great figures of the Russian Revolution. Rubakin in turn welcomed every new reader; his motto, imprinted on his bookplates, declared: “Long live the book, a powerful weapon in the struggle for truth and justice.” Upon his death in 1946 the Soviet Union inherited the collection, variously estimated at 80,000 to 100,000 volumes, and its departure represented a great blow to East European studies in the West.

Ukranians in American East European Studies

1976 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-112
Author(s):  
Alexander Sydorenko
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
European Studies ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Political Studies

Ukranian scholars in the United States pursue a broad range of disciplines, making significant contributions to such fields of inquiry as literature, linguistics, political studies, and economics. This paper will review the contributions to the study of Ukrainian history. It will examine some of the practical problems affecting the development of the Ukrainian historical studies in the United States and then review the work of a few selected scholars, whose research and publications typify the tenor and the direction of the Ukrainian historiography outside the Soviet Union.

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