Nuclear Issues

"...if China continues to prioritise friendly commercial relations with North Korea and Iran, it will threaten its own long-term security. A chronically proliferating North Korea would provoke Japan to reassess the need for a nuclear deterrent, while a nuclear-armed Iran could destabilise the Gulf and global energy markets. Crafting an approach that includes a sustained US-China engagement to clarify each side's intent, provides for China's energy security and maintains a focus on the threat of nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran is more likely to achieve our shared non-proliferation goals."

"...a new look at global atomic energy supplies is sorely needed."

"...the Bush administration's foreign policy rests on a deep misreading of contemporary world politics. Conducting foreign policy on the basis of flawed premises is like designing an airplane while ignoring gravity...."

This volume sets out to examine and analyse how governments and military organizations planned for an uncertain and potentially threatening future during four different peacetime periods spanning from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of the Second World War.

"...the fog of peace can never be entirely pierced. Flexibility and constant cultivation of the ability to question received wisdom and to reconsider assumptions are the best security against catastrophic failure in a future war, regardless of whether that war resembles a more traditional interstate war or the current war on terror."

"...de Gaulle had a longer-term view of France's potential foes than most military officers, which allowed him to see beyond the immediate needs of colonial wars."

"...in their scope and diversity, the cases provide an excellent overview of the challenges confronting military planners over the last two hundred years."

"Globalization has the effect of incapacitating states as autonomous units."