Ebook Free The Cold War: A MILITARY History, by David Miller
If you still need much more publications The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller as recommendations, going to look the title and motif in this website is available. You will discover even more lots publications The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller in various disciplines. You can additionally as quickly as possible to review guide that is already downloaded. Open it and also save The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller in your disk or device. It will ease you any place you need the book soft data to review. This The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller soft file to check out can be referral for everyone to boost the ability and also capacity.
The Cold War: A MILITARY History, by David Miller
Ebook Free The Cold War: A MILITARY History, by David Miller
The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller. Join with us to be member here. This is the internet site that will give you alleviate of browsing book The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller to review. This is not as the various other site; guides will certainly be in the kinds of soft file. What benefits of you to be member of this site? Obtain hundred collections of book connect to download and install as well as get always updated book each day. As one of the books we will present to you now is the The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller that includes a quite satisfied principle.
Why should be this publication The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller to read? You will never ever get the knowledge and experience without getting by on your own there or attempting on your own to do it. For this reason, reading this e-book The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller is needed. You can be fine and proper adequate to get just how essential is reviewing this The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller Even you consistently read by obligation, you could sustain on your own to have reading e-book practice. It will be so beneficial as well as fun then.
But, exactly how is the way to obtain this e-book The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller Still perplexed? It does not matter. You could appreciate reviewing this e-book The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller by on-line or soft documents. Merely download and install the publication The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller in the web link supplied to see. You will get this The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller by online. After downloading, you can save the soft data in your computer or kitchen appliance. So, it will certainly relieve you to read this publication The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller in particular time or location. It might be not exactly sure to appreciate reviewing this book The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller, considering that you have great deals of work. Yet, with this soft documents, you could delight in reviewing in the leisure also in the gaps of your jobs in office.
Again, reviewing routine will always offer beneficial perks for you. You could not need to spend often times to check out the e-book The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller Just alloted a number of times in our extra or spare times while having meal or in your workplace to check out. This The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller will certainly reveal you brand-new point that you could do now. It will assist you to enhance the top quality of your life. Event it is simply a fun book The Cold War: A MILITARY History, By David Miller, you can be healthier as well as a lot more fun to appreciate reading.
From 1949 to 1991 the terrible potential of the Cold War loomed over the United States, the Soviet Union, and by extension, the rest of the world. The seeming-certainty of global nuclear conflict defined and articulated the cultural, political, and in particular, the military evolution of both nations. The Cold War provoked an unprecedented military build-up, and the rapidly advancing technology of warfare inspired fundamental changes in military strategy and tactics.
Many books have been written about the politics of this turbulent period, but none have so comprehensively examined the conflict's military strategy and tactics. Using newly declassified information, David Miller, a noted military historian, reveals not only the vast effect that Cold War technology had on the military, but also how the threat of war very nearly became a terrible reality. Chillingly, Miller reveals that while the menace of nuclear war dominated the military theory of the time, there was little in reality that corresponded to these theories. The book goes on to examine each military area in turn, covering the formation of the two great alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and the strategies and major weapons in the rival navies, armies and air forces. Finally, his in-depth analysis of how military strategy shaped events, and his accounts of crises which could have turned the Cold War hot--the suppression of the Budapest uprising in 1956, and the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981--are essential to an understanding of this definitive period in history.
That the Cold War ended without a conflict was due to professionalism on both sides. The result, Miller suggests, would have impressed the Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, who, writing in the fifth century BC, said that "to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill."
- Sales Rank: #1964299 in Books
- Published on: 1999-12-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 6.00" w x 1.25" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 480 pages
Amazon.com Review
ICBMs and MIRVs, duck-and-cover drills and fallout suits, the Warsaw Pact and the Berlin Garrison: it has been over for only a decade, but in many ways the material and symbolic culture of the cold-war era seems ancient. British military historian David Miller documents the military aspects of the decades-long struggle between East and West as if it indeed happened long ago, patiently and thoroughly explaining the complex disagreements among the Allied powers over how the post-World War II world was to be ruled, and how those disagreements led in time to the Iron Curtain, the arms race, and the specter of nuclear holocaust.
Miller takes great interest in the ordnance of destruction, cataloging the orders of battle and assets of the contending powers and their satellites. At times this thoroughness overcomes clarity with a surfeit of acronym-laden detail ("the SS-16 carried a single 1 MT warhead and was essentially an SS-20 with an additional third stage, giving it a range of 9,000 km. This range meant that the SS-16 was classified as an ICBM and was covered by the SALT treaty, whereas the SS-20 was an IRBM and thus was not covered by SALT"). The complex prose notwithstanding, Miller offers a highly useful synopsis of the struggle, closing with an understated observation: "Both sides in the Cold War seem to have realized that a conflict between them would almost certainly have escalated from conventional to nuclear.... In consequence, they kept their heads, and for forty years they kept the arms race within reason--just." --Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly
The British author of 24 books mostly on military history (The United States and Africa, etc.), Miller has produced a look at the Cold War that is astonishingly light on the broad diplomatic perspective and way too heavy on the technologyAin fact, to call this a military history is to misidentify the book in relation to others that explore the larger events shaping the conflict between East and West throughout the postwar period. This account is chock-full of the development of weapon systems, with little discussion of the strategic and political needs that shaped their evolution, and even less of a look at the theaters in which they were deployed. There is nothing in here of Vietnam, Korea, the Cuban missile crisis, Afghanistan or any of the spy incidents between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Instead, we get tallies of how many nuclear weapons tests were carried out by each side, how many battleships, submarines and planes they had and how they were equipped. Only in the first part of the book does the author show his range of knowledge with a thorough and engaging look at the political landscape of the post-WWII world. Given the subject matter, Miller's writing is necessarily dry, a dull enumeration of various types of weapons and war ships ("The first six SSNs all had the traditional long, thin hull and twin propellers of the German Type XXI"). This prodigious accounting of Cold War weaponry will be of interest only to the serious military scholar and technophile. 16 pages b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Miller's title is slightly misleading: his book is more an examination of how military equipment affected military strategy and operations than of how the two sides deployed their forces. Every new technological development, Miller argues, was matched by some kind of counterdevelopment, thus maintaining a precarious stalemate. Dominating all thoughts were nuclear weapons; thankfully, they were never used. Miller, who has written several other books on military equipment, describes the birth of rival alliances, strategic issues, and the force levels and capabilities of various branches of the armed forces. The Korean and Vietnamese wars get little coverage, with most of the attention going to Europe, where NATO and the Warsaw Pact faced off. Naturally, because of the availability of information, the book focuses primarily on the Western forces; but the information about Communist leadership, thoughts, and actions is fascinating. Included are 28 detailed appendixes filled with facts and figures on weapons systems and defense organizations. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.ADaniel K. Blewett, Loyola Univ. Lib., Chicago
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Far from the Final Word on the Cold War's Military History
By Steven S. Berizzi
Any author seeking to write a military history of the Cold War has undertaken a very formidable task. The intense and extensive military rivalry - and its related political, economic, and diplomatic competition - between the American and Soviet superpowers and their respective allies lasted nearly fifty years and was "fought" on practically every continent. So the fact that David Miller's The Cold War: A Military History is highly selective in the themes it addresses does not, in principle, trouble me. As a practical matter, that is the only way that a military history of the Cold War could be fit into one volume. But this book is not really history. It is, instead, a collection of relatively short essays, mostly about weapons and weapons systems developed and used to arm the Cold War military forces. As an introduction to those subjects, this book probably has some value, but it is not the narrative of Cold War military events which the title suggests.
I also take issue with the book's narrow focus: According to Miller, "central Europe best symbolizes what went on during the Cold War and is the most likely place for the fighting to have started." That assertion will come as a surprise to men and women who served in the American armed forces in Korea and Vietnam, as well as to their Soviet counterparts who served in Afghanistan. Miller's approach probably works for most of the period called the "high Cold War," which lasted from the first Berlin crisis in 1948 until the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. But from that point in time until the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989, I would suggest that the Cold War in central Europe was relatively stable. In contrast, during the last three decades of the Cold War, there were serious and lengthy Cold War conflicts "by proxy" in Vietnam and Afghanistan, as well as "hot spot" crises elsewhere in Asia, as well as in Africa and central America. Any book purporting to be a general military history of the Cold War which focuses exclusively on central Europe is going to mislead, and that is precisely what I consider one of this book's most serious shortcomings. Miller's emphasis on events in central Europe also is of limited value because he devotes too much space to the possibility of conventional war. During the formative period of the Cold War, from the end of the Second World War in Europe until the first Berlin crisis, the Soviet Union maintained huge tank armies and infantry forces in eastern Europe. Precisely in order to deter conventional war, first the United States and, later, Great Britain and France, developed atomic weapons. We will never know, of course, what would have happened if the Soviet Union's tanks and infantry had invaded western Europe, but I believe it is virtually certain that the United States would have responded with strategic and/or tactical atomic weapons. Indeed, according to Miller, "at least in public, NATO regarded battlefield nuclear weapons either as a reasonable response to Soviet first strike or as a last resort in the face of imminent conventional defeat." Nevertheless, Miller deserves credit for making this significant point: "The perceived threat from the Soviet Union caused the European nations and those of North America to draw together through NATO in a way which had never previously proved possible, even in the face of war." Miller writes: "In the mass of documents released since the end of the Cold War, no evidence has been found of any Warsaw Pact defensive plans, except for a few formulated in the three final years, after President Gorbachev had insisted that the General Staff prepare them. Instead, all plans concentrated on a series of massive attacks, which were aimed at securing Soviet control of the entire west-European land mass." That is interesting! However, this next point demonstrates Miller's discussion of protracted conventional war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations is superfluous. Miller writes: "According to Soviet and East German planning documents, the major plan for the Central Front aimed at reaching the German-French border in between thirteen and fifteen days, and then of overrunning France so that the leading troops arrived at the Atlantic coast and the Franco-Spanish border by the thirty-fifth day." Does anyone believe that the United States would have permitted the Soviet Union's tanks to race across Germany and then on to the Atlantic without using every weapon in its nuclear arsenal to prevent? When Miller decided to concentrate on weapons and weapons systems, in my opinion, he also should have decided to provide more information about their awesome expense because continuously developing and upgrading equipment was the key feature of the political economy of the Cold War. Only in his final chapter does Miller address "The Financial Cost," which may, in the long run, prove to be the most important aspect of the entire Cold War. But he provides virtually no details, except to state: "The true costs of defence equipment were virtually impossible to calculate." Miller concludes: "What was certain...as judged by the eventual collapse of the U.S.S.R., was that the cost proved to be unaffordable." I believe that will be one of the great historiographical debates of the coming century: Whether Soviet Communism was simply an ideology whose time came and went or whether the economic demands of the Cold War simply proved too much for the Soviet state to sustain? Furthermore, I believe Miller might have offered some comments about the nearly-indiscriminate distribution of weapons by the Cold War antagonists to Third World countries because I believe that is going to prove to be one of the most serious legacies of the Cold War.
I would recommend David Miller's The Cold War to novices and students who want some basic information about weapons, weapons systems, and their impact on certain issues of strategy. But, the title notwithstanding, this book is far from the final word on the Cold War's military history.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
An Encyclopedia, Not a Narrative
By Dwayne A. Day
This book is more of an encyclopedic listing of major weapons systems deployed by the United States and the Soviet Union than a proper history. Such a reference is certainly needed and this one is pretty comprehensive. Unfortunately, what is really needed is a true encyclopedia, complete with photographs, diagrams and extensive cross-references. This book is not it. One gets the sense that Miller was originally trying to write something similar to the Janes series that he has worked on, but the publisher nixed the idea of a glossy, heavily illustrated reference book and wanted something that looked more like a conventional history.
Miller does provide comprehensive coverage of the topic and provides a lot of interesting details. There are also many useful tables and appendices at the back of the book.
Despite this wide-ranging coverage, however, Miller almost completely ignores the role of satellites during the Cold War. Although highly classified, they played significant roles in treaty verification and also improved stability. For instance, the "missile gap" of the early 1960s was eliminated by the first American reconnaissance satellites and as a result, the United States did not build thousands more ICBMs.
One thing that bothered me was the limited references provided for the information. He has only a handful of references for each chapter, despite the fact that the chapters are packed with information. This makes it impossible to look up further information (or check the information in the book). Where, for instance, does Miller get the reliability rates for the Navy's Polaris missiles? That's a fascinating detail, but I wanted to read more about it. Yet he has only two footnotes for the entire chapter.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Title of Book is Misleading
By John G. Hilliard
The author did a disservice to himself by incorrectly stating in the title of the book that it was a history of the cold war. The book is not, unlike the title might suggest, a history of the cold war. The book does not cover anything much outside of Europe and really does not touch on the political issues of the time.
What the book does give you is a very detailed and interesting review of the U.S., NATO and Warsaw Pact equipment, base structure and high level battle strategies for a war in Europe. The author has done a good amount of research on these topics and presents a very readable rundown of this information. If you are interested in these topics, especially the details on the equipment used then this book can almost act as a reference book. Overall it is a good book, good level of detail and written in a readable fashion.
The Cold War: A MILITARY History, by David Miller PDF
The Cold War: A MILITARY History, by David Miller EPub
The Cold War: A MILITARY History, by David Miller Doc
The Cold War: A MILITARY History, by David Miller iBooks
The Cold War: A MILITARY History, by David Miller rtf
The Cold War: A MILITARY History, by David Miller Mobipocket
The Cold War: A MILITARY History, by David Miller Kindle
No comments:
Post a Comment