The CIA and the Bomber and Missile Gap

2020 ◽  
pp. 100-111
Author(s):  
Huw Dylan ◽  
David V. Gioe ◽  
Michael S. Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Long Range ◽  
Atomic Energy ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Joint Chiefs Of Staff ◽  
National Priority ◽  
Atomic Weapon ◽  
Modern Warfare

This chapter is concerned with analysing the Soviet strategic threat. It opens with a discussion of how technological innovations creating relatively small movable weapons ensured that modern warfare had forever changed. Atomic intelligence became a matter of the highest priority, as did spying on the aircraft and missiles that would deliver these weapons. US intelligence underestimated the speed at which the USSR could develop and test an atomic weapon and overestimated the number of bombers capable of delivering such weapons. Developing better intelligence became a principal national priority. Document: AQUATONE Briefing for the Joint Chiefs of Staff RE Guided Missiles, Atomic Energy, and Long Range Bombers.

The emotions in war: fear and the British and American military, 1914–45

2001 ◽  
Vol 74 (185) ◽  
pp. 314-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Bourke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Physiology ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
American Military ◽  
Modern Warfare ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Second World

Abstract In modern warfare, technological innovations are applied to terrifying effect. On the machine-dominated battlefields of the twentieth century, the ability of individuals to master their emotions is crucial to the whole martial enterprise. Fear has widely been recognized as the most fraught of all emotions: it may stimulate combatants to fight and it may cause them to flee. This article examines the proliferation of theories about the nature of this emotion within the British and American forces during the First and Second World Wars. The military recognized the impact of new technologies upon human physiology and psychology, elaborated ways of interpreting the particular threat posed by ‘fear’ in modern conflicts, and prescribed ways of disciplining the emotional lives of combatants.

Jacob Bronowski: a humanist intellectual for an atomic age, 1946–1956

2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 573-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
RALPH DESMARAIS
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Development Programme ◽  
Atomic Energy ◽  
Substantial Contribution ◽  
Atomic Age ◽  
Moral Compass ◽  
Pure Mathematician ◽  
Atomic Weapon ◽  
Weapon Development

AbstractJacob (‘Bruno’) Bronowski (1908–1974), on the basis of having examined the effects of the atomic bombing of Japan in late 1945, became one of Britain's most vocal and best-known scientific intellectuals engaged in the cultural politics of the early atomic era. Witnessing Hiroshima helped transform him from pure mathematician–poet to scientific administrator; from obscurity to fame on the BBC airwaves and in print; and, crucially, from literary intellectual who promoted the superior truthfulness of poetry and poets to scientific humanist insisting that science and scientists were the standard-bearers of truth. A cornerstone of Bronowski's humanist ideology was that Hiroshima and the bomb had become symbols of the public's distrust of science, whereas, in reality, science was merely a scapegoat for society's loss of moral compass; more correctly, he stressed, science and scientists epitomized positive moral values. When discussing atomic energy, especially after 1949, Bronowski not only downplayed the bomb's significance but was deliberately vague regarding Britain's atomic weapon development programme; this lack of candour was compounded by Bronowski's evasiveness regarding his own prior involvement with wartime bombing. The net effect was a substantial contribution to British scientific intellectuals' influential yet frequently misleading accounts of the relations between science and war in the early atomic era.

Special Assistant for Disarmament, 1955–1958

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence S. Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Aid ◽  
Atomic Energy Commission ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
Atomic Energy ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Short Life ◽  
Joint Chiefs Of Staff ◽  
Russian Soil ◽  
Ambitious Program ◽  
Foreign Operations

It was apparent from the beginning that the Foreign Operations Administration would have a short life. Arms control and disarmament played a larger role in Eisenhower’s thinking than did the management of foreign aid. After appointing Stassen his special assistant for disarmament, the president appeared to be unnerved by the complicated program he proposed. Eisenhower was particularly put off by the numbers—the 20,000 to 30,000 non-Russian inspectors on Russian soil that Stassen recommended. Dulles, too, derided those figures as unrealistic. Ultimately, according to historian H. W. Brands, Stassen failed to win the president’s support for his plan. Political scientist David Tal phrased Eisenhower’s disapproval more starkly, claiming that he “excoriated the plan” and that the only thing it achieved was to unite. the Atomic Energy Commission, the CIA, the Defense Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff against Stassen’s ambitious program.

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