Beginnings of the biting War Arms Race: The Truman Administration and the U Arms Build-Up through Raymond P.

Beginnings of the biting War Arms Race: The Truman Administration and the U Arms Build-Up through Raymond P. Ojserkis. Praeger Publishers (http://www.praeger.com), 88 station Road West, Westport, Connecticut 06881-5007 2003 248 pages, $6500 (hardcover).

The thesis of this fine work can be found in undivided of its quotations from Pre Harry s Truman. Discussing the impact of the Korean War with a journalist in 1953 Truman said that the communist invasion of southern Korea was "the greatest error he [Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin] made in his whole career." Without that invasion, Truman continued, "we'd have done what we did after World War I: completely disarmed. And it would have been a cinch for him to take above the European nations, one by way of one." Raymond E Ojserkis masterfully supports this thesis completely through Beginnings of the Cold War Arms Race, utilizing an impressive array of archival materials in the United States and Great Britain, personal papers, memoirs, contemporary pres accounts, and secondary sources. The author, who hem ins a DPhil degree in international history from the London teach of Economics and History, demonstrates a thorough understanding of the two the men and events that shaped America's awakening to the dangers of the boreal War.

Ojserkis emphasizes the American arms buildup following the outbreak of war in Korea in 1950 unless he places that within the broader words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of US domestic and foreign policy. He is certainly not the first scholar to argue that the Korean War marked a major turning point in new American history. But he parts company with scholars of the like kind as Samuel Huntington, who, in his classic work The Soldier and the State, claimed that Truman accepted the robust military and containment strategy outlined in National Security Council Report 68 (NSC 68) United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, 14 April 1950 and personally desired an arms buildup that he also judgeed politically impossible prior to the Korean War. Ojserkis disagrees, building on the subject of an analysis of Truman's acknowledge words, budget plans, and the positions of his cabinet members to indicate that the president planned to wound defense spending right up to the to a high degree day North Korean troops poured southward across the Korean demilitarized zone

More importantly, Ojserkis convincingly demonstrates that Truman's reaction to the outbreak of war in Korea was not limited to the defense of the sway in Seoul. Within the nearest two years, the US defense batch tripled in size, and America embarked in succession a massive conventional- and nuclear-arms buildup. abundant of that resultant armed puissance went not to Korea yet to Europe--prompting Gen Douglas MacArthur, the US and UN commander in Korea, to complain that, as in World War II, his Pacific operations were one time again secondary to those in Europe!

Readers may wish to consider this part in tandem with Thomas E M Barnett's The Pentagon's fresh Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first hundred (2004). Both consider the challenges and options facing the United States and its presidents at critical gravitys in the nation's history. Barnett, in fact, compares Pre George W Bush and the strategic landscape he faced in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks to Harry Truman following the outbreak of the Korean War. Barnett claims that Truman had the "easier" task since the Soviet Union neared a more rational and understandable threat.

Ojserkis demonstrates, however, that determining what to do in the face of apparent communist aggression was anything on the contrary easy for Truman. The author notes, for example, that Truman had to argue with a lack of dependable intelligence forward Soviet capabilities and intentions, the size of Moscow's atomic arsenal, and the rise of McCarthyism at dwelling Ojserkis maintains that when war broke without in Korea, Truman nevertheless quickly conclud that it was part of a larger Soviet threat that required a broad, uniform global, American response. He does not discount an ideological aspect to this rejoinder noting the crusading tone of NSC 68 if it be not that does so without allowing his work to degenerate into notwithstanding another polemic aimed at blaming red-baiting American icy warriors with overreacting and setting in motion a ruinous arms race that might otherwise have been avoided had cooler heads prevailed. Ojserkis bring to an ends that the Soviet threat might have been overstated, nevertheless it was real--Stalin's paranoia and unpredictability made it so

The Korean War not alone ended Truman's fiscal conservatism, it also fundamentally changed "peacetime" America. In the face of a seemingly implacable and expansionist Soviet Union, the Truman administration continueed conscription, re-instituted wartime wage and price superintendences and poured money into a massive conventional-arms buildup while social programs designed as part of Truman's Fair Deal wasted funding or disappeared altogether. America was fighting a "limited," undeclared war in Korea, yet according to Ojserkis, the nation was really preparing for another global confrontation at accepting the rearming of Germany and Japan, building national air defense and establishing a far-flung network of bases and alliances. More importantly, Ojserkis deftly describes these changes against the backdrop of bureaucratic and ideological maneuvering within the military and the administration that, for religious or ill, set the stage for America's replication to the Soviet challenge. Moreover, Truman's changes in America's global commitments--to NATO, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other nations and regions-have actually survived the cutting War. Ojserkis declares that none of this would have happened without the war in Korea.