In December 1979, NATO adopted Dual Track. This resolution had two tracks: the modernisation of NATO’s Theatre Nuclear Forces and an offer to arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union. At the time, the Netherlands conditionally accepted Dual Track. Dutch opposition to nuclear modernisation was too great. The government postponed the decision for two years, linking it to the results of arms control negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the end, the postponement would last for six years. The crisis that followed the Dual Track decision would become known as the Euromissile Crisis. The goal of this thesis is two-fold. On the one hand, the goal is to explore the reasoning behind this postponement. It will look into the domestic and international factors that influenced Dutch decision-making. The Dutch public did not want to deploy new missiles, whereas the NATO allies pressured the government to make a decision. This thesis has shown that domestic pressures were incredibly influential at the beginning of the crisis. That is why Dual Track was conditionally accepted. However, international factors, such as the need for solidarity within NATO, increased significantly over time. On the other hand, it researches how Dutch margins for manoeuvre were increased during the Euromissile Crisis. In line with New Cold War History, this thesis argues that the Netherlands was not just a small state that had to follow the path the bigger NATO states decided. There was the opportunity to push its own agenda.

This thesis aims to discuss narratives concerning suppressed memories in post-war Norway andcontribute to the research on the political uses of, and influence on, history. Specifically, it addresses the issue of how politics can suppress memory and force certain histories to be “forgotten”. This research contributes to a larger academic discussion about post-war memory, and how the magnitude of an event does not necessarily result in its inclusion into history. The thesis also expands upon the growing research on Soviet memory in Norway and helps shed light on a catastrophe that is largely unknown. It also addressed why the victims of this enormous catastrophe had to wait so long to be laid to rest. This thesis intends to do this through an examination of the history of M/S Rigel and how it serves as an example for the way in which different narratives and political policies affect how history is portrayed, remembered, and why Rigel and its victims were, and have again, been forgotten for such a long time. This is done through the use of sources such as archival records, newspapers and secondary sources such as writings in local and maritime history, which are examined by the use of theories on the use of history, memory, and historical narratives. This is accomplished through methodical narrative analyses of these documents to gain further insight into the realities of Rigel’s perception throughout the period from its sinking to today.

Doctor of Philosophy / Traditional military descriptions of conflict tend to focus on the movement of soldiers and armies across battlefields. When the airplane emerged, it forced military theorists to contend with a new, vertical, dimension of conflict. In America, the United States Air Force assumed an important role in this vertical dimension as the country's delivery mechanism for nuclear weapons. However, at the same time that politicians, academics, and military officials debated the offensive uses for aircraft a second debate occurred describing how best to use military means to defend the North American continent. Those who advocated for a defensive system to protect North American, including the President Eisenhower, strongly advocated for a continent-wide test of the new air defense system. That test was conducted once a year between 1960 and 1962 during which all civilian air travel across the U.S. and Canada was suspended. The tests were called the "Sky Shield" exercises. This research shows how a prevailing mood of fear and vulnerability gave air defense proponents the political capital to build a continental air defense network and test it during the Sky Shield exercises. Further, it describes the enduring legacy of this domestically-focused Cold War defense program. The research finds that America's approach to Cold War continental defense was strong when it was aligned with the White House's nuclear strategy, but when successive political leaders changed nuclear strategies that decision negatively influenced continental defense programs. This research is useful because it examines a relatively under-explored area of Cold War defense programs. Traditionally these studies focus on offensive capabilities far from American shores. This study instead examines homeland defense and how it changed during the Cold War as a function of changing nuclear programs and changing threats to the United States.

Yes / This article discusses the international consequences of the trial of British businessman and spy Edgar Sanders in Budapest at a critical juncture of the early Cold War. Convicted of espionage on the basis of a ‘confession’ in court, the defendant was sentenced to thirteen years in prison. The failed attempts to free the English prisoner led to a breakdown in bilateral relations and a British trade embargo. The related trial of American executive Robert Vogeler has received extensive coverage in Hungarian- and English-language sources. By comparison, the Sanders case has attracted little scholarly attention. This article is the first comprehensive treatment of the case.

No / The military dimension of the Cold War was characterised by the strategic nuclear stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union as well as the large-scale regional military confrontation in Central Europe. As part of the process of East-West détente there was an effort to address the risks of war in Europe by means of an arms control process referred to as MBFR (Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions). The true purposes and intentions of both sides (NATO and the Warsaw Pact) in these negotiations has so far not been fully understood. This book is based on path-breaking archival research that clarifies the objectives and tactics of the parties to the negotiations and the reasons for why the negotiations ended without an agreement. It makes a major new contribution to the understanding of Cold War History.

This thesis conceptualizes post-Second World War Soviet émigré theory, i.e., how the Soviets made sense of their expatriates and related to them (something previously only studied in passing). To this end, the study draws on instructional, academic, and administrative Soviet sources. It also examines the application of this theory on the unconventional Estonian emigration in Sweden in reports from Soviet bureaucracies in 1953–1962. By comparing preconceptions to reality and exposing occasional mismatches, the study hopes to give insight into the properties and historical origins of this distinct and influential part of Soviet ideology.

The following thesis describes the life and activities of Jorge Ricardo Masetti, an Argentinian journalist who was assigned to interview Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution against dictator Fulgencio Batista. Masetti was responsible for broadcasting interviews with Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara to the rest of Latin America for the first time, allowing people to understand what was happening in Cuba through the words of the Revolution’s leaders. Masetti returned to Cuba to found the first international Latin American news agency, Prensa Latina, which still exists today. However, ideological factionalism within Prensa Latina drove Masetti to resign in 1961. Afterwards, he worked closely with Che Guevara to foment a guerrilla uprising in the pair’s home country of Argentina, forming a guerrilla army known as the Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo (EGP). Using the experiences of revolutionaries abroad in places like Cuba and Algeria, the EGP faced several setbacks in their area of operations, the province of Salta, that ultimately led to the group’s demise before their operations had truly begun. Masetti, cornered by the Argentine Gendarmerie, disappeared into the jungle in 1964, never to be seen again. His life illuminates aspects of transnational ideology, namely socialism, and its mosaic nature. His life also reveals facets of the informational and journalistic endeavors in Latin America during the Cold War.

In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower charged an ad hoc advisory group with assessing the current U.S. Cold War effort and offering recommendations for an 'unified and dynamic' way forward. This work investigates the case of Eisenhower's Presidential Committee on International Information Activities and its role in the United States' approach to the Cold War. Problematizing that which is often taken for granted, this empirical, interpretive study uncovers the discursive conditions of possibility for and the discursive activities taking place within Jackson Committee decision making processes. Employing a constructivist discursive framework, this project builds on an understanding of policy making as a process of argumentation in which actors intersubjectively define problems and delimit policy and strategy options. Revealing discursive conditions of possibility enables a deeper understanding of the substance, tensions and discursive maneuvers informing subsequent U.S. strategy and policy choices during the Cold War and may offer insights into understanding and addressing geopolitical challenges in the 21st century. The thick analytic narrative illuminates the 'witcraft' involved in conceptualizing the unique threat posed by the Soviet Union whose practices challenged existing categories, and in extending wartime discourses to the post-war geopolitical environment. It examines discursive practices informing the nascent concepts of national strategy, psychological warfare, and political warfare, including arguments for constituent elements and relationships between them. In so doing, this dissertation conceptualizes national strategy as practices underpinning a prioritized drive for competitive advantage over adversaries. Additionally, political warfare represents practices intended to create and present alternatives to foreign actors that are in the U.S. interest through the integration and coordination of diplomatic, economic, military, and informational activities. Based on its conceptualization of a long-term adversarial competition with the Soviet Union, the committee recommended solutions for a sustainable national strategy of political warfare prioritizing the free world and liberal world order. Its recommendations sought to recast strategic panic into strategic patience. / Ph. D. / Within geopolitics, threats sometimes emerge that policymakers consider unique because of their goals and/or methods for challenging the status quo, including communicating directly with foreign populations to confuse or gain support. These can be periods of strategic panic and conceptual confusion as policymakers, the press, and even academics work to classify these new threats and develop appropriate responses. The reasoning process usually begins by using familiar categories which individuals extend through storytelling and debates as a means to develop a shared understanding and language to describe the new geopolitical situation and possible policy options. Today the Cold War seems like a familiar and well-understood competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. However, in the early post-World War II years, policymakers wrestled with understanding and addressing Soviet actions, including Communist propaganda activities throughout the world. In 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked an ad hoc advisory group to assess the Cold War situation and offer new “unified and dynamic” ways for securing the United States and advancing U.S. interests. This research examines the advisory Jackson Committee’s rhetorical activities informing its recommendations for a national strategy of political warfare that would create and offer alternatives to foreign populations that were in the U.S. interest. The Committee recommended prioritizing the development of a liberal world order as a way to gain a competitive advantage over the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. It offered solutions for directing and mobilizing integrated and coordinated national activities across diplomacy, economics, information, and the military. Additionally, the Committee envisioned the possibility of inspiring and guiding quotidian societal activities to reinforce the foundations of the aspirational world order. This study stems from the premise that understanding how recommendations come about are as important as the recommendations themselves. Illuminating meanings and practices considered during the policy making process can provide insights into subsequent substance and tensions within national security strategies and policies. To do so, this study re-creates a narrative of the storytelling and debates involved in defining workable problems, addressing conceptual confusion, and developing solutions deemed sustainable over the “long-haul.”

This dissertation of limited scope traces the attempts by Gorbachev (1985-1991) to reform an economic, political and social system which was in a state of terminal decline. The origins of its demise, it is argued, lay in the ossified command economy inherited from Stalin. The enormous damage inflicted on Soviet agriculture during collectivisation in the 1930s~ when millions of productive peasants died, proved to be a fatal blow to that sector. Tlms, Gorbachev followed a two-fold strategy ofrefonn. Glasnost (openness) was introduced to allow constructive debate on economic and social matters. Despite a hesitant beginning, the right to criticise allowed the emergence of more radical campaigners, such as Yeltsin who demanded greater democracy. Significantly, the revival of ethnic nationalist demands in the republics led to disintegration. Perestroika (restructuring) was intended to modernise and boost living standards. The economy faltered but the market was not yet in place / History / M.A. (History)

Scholars assert that the Cold War began at one of several different points. Material recently available at the National Archives yields a view different from those already presented. From these records, and material from the Foreign Relations Series, Parliamentary Debates, and United States Government documents, a new picture emerges. This study focuses on the British occupation of Germany and on the Council of Foreign Ministers' Moscow Conference of 1947. The failure of this conference preceded the adoption of the Marshall Plan and a stronger Western policy toward the Soviet Union. Thus, the Moscow Conference emphasized the disintegrating relations between East and West which resulted in the Cold War.