Soviet military policy has been one of the most important and perplexing issues confronting the United States since 1945. Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign policy innovations have focused renewed attention on these vital questions. In this timely reader, ten experts on the Soviet Union offer their perspectives on Soviet military strategy and defense policy, covering the foreign policy context, nuclear weapons, conventional forces, and force and Soviet diplomacy.

Contributors Jack Snyder, Franklyn Griffiths, Stephen M. Meyer, Raymond L. Garthoff, Fritz W. Ermarth, Dimitri K. Simes,...

These five essays from the prestigious journal International Security analyze the outbreak of the First World War from the standpoint of power politics and military strategy. "The disaster of 1914 continues to haunt the contemporary security debate," writes Steven E. Miller in his introduction. "In the nuclear age, the images that remain from the summer of 1914--the escalation from an isolated event in a far corner of Europe to a global war, the apparent loss of control of the situation by key decision-makers, the crowding out of diplomacy by military exigencies, the awful,...

What causes war? How can military conflicts best be prevented? In this book, Stephen Van Evera frames five conditions that increase the risk of interstate war: false optimism about the likely outcome of a war, a first-strike advantage, fluctuation in the relative power of states, circumstances that allow nations to parlay one conquest into another, and circumstances that make conquest easy.

According to Van Evera, all but one of these conditions false optimism rarely occur today, but policymakers often erroneously believe in their existence. He argues that these misperceptions are...

These essays from the journal International Security assess the technical feasibility and the strategic desirability of defense against ballistic missiles.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase...

These essays from the journal International Security cover aspects of past and present naval technologies and explore current disputes over American naval doctrine. Four of the contributions--those by Linton Brooks, John Mearsheimer, Barry Posen, and Joshua Epstein--describe the case for and against the Reagan administration's controversial Maritime Strategy, which has formed the basis for the administration's buildup to a six-hundred-ship navy. Other articles describe Soviet naval doctrine, assess the risk of nuclear war at sea, and outline the evolution of major naval technologies...