Milton Leitenberg - Böcker

Milton Leitenberg has done us a great service. His balanced and comprehensive reconstruction of the history of Soviet submarine operations in Swedish waters will benefit all students of Soviet policy and practice in Northern Europe. The accompanying discussions of the domestic and international political contexts within which those submarine operations were perceived, responded to, and reported on, doubles the value of the work. The full Soviet military rationale for those operations may remain somewhat elusive, but Leitenberg has clearly provided us with a cogent description of their political consequences. Robert G. Weinland, Consultant, Washington, D.CThe book first presents a comprehensive account of the overall incidence of violations, not only in Sweden but in other countries as well, between 1970 and 1987. The author then shows that the provisional, more exploratory stages of the operations in Sweden apparently began well before 1980 and have continued despite the Soviet Union's public campaign for a Nordic Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone. An analysis of the incursions is given next, including a look at Sweden's response to a problem it may not have anticipated when its own preconceptions and the norms of international behavior were clearly contradicted by reality. Also discussed are the motives behind the Soviet submarine operations and various provocation theories.

Milton Leitenberg has done us a great service. His balanced and comprehensive reconstruction of the history of Soviet submarine operations in Swedish waters will benefit all students of Soviet policy and practice in Northern Europe. The accompanying discussions of the domestic and international political contexts within which those submarine operations were perceived, responded to, and reported on, doubles the value of the work. The full Soviet military rationale for those operations may remain somewhat elusive, but Leitenberg has clearly provided us with a cogent description of their political consequences. Robert G. Weinland, Consultant, Washington, D.CThe book first presents a comprehensive account of the overall incidence of violations, not only in Sweden but in other countries as well, between 1970 and 1987. The author then shows that the provisional, more exploratory stages of the operations in Sweden apparently began well before 1980 and have continued despite the Soviet Union's public campaign for a Nordic Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone. An analysis of the incursions is given next, including a look at Sweden's response to a problem it may not have anticipated when its own preconceptions and the norms of international behavior were clearly contradicted by reality. Also discussed are the motives behind the Soviet submarine operations and various provocation theories.

Proponents of arms control and disarmament are often confronted with the argument that reductions in defense expenditure lead to cutbacks in military industries and thus to economic hardship. While a reduction in defense production would cause some economic dislocation, this would be mitigated by the ability of the economy to adapt to changing patterns of production. This book, first published in 1983, assesses the likely effects of reductions in defense industries by an examination of the roles these industries play in national economies. Each chapter discusses industry employment, output, research and development, capital value, profitability, concentration and competition, internal organization and regional employment concentration. Other questions considered include the economic importance of weapons exports, the defense industry as a ‘leading edge’ in maintaining national technological capabilities, and the reliance of individual firms on defense contracting.

Proponents of arms control and disarmament are often confronted with the argument that reductions in defense expenditure lead to cutbacks in military industries and thus to economic hardship. While a reduction in defense production would cause some economic dislocation, this would be mitigated by the ability of the economy to adapt to changing patterns of production. This book, first published in 1983, assesses the likely effects of reductions in defense industries by an examination of the roles these industries play in national economies. Each chapter discusses industry employment, output, research and development, capital value, profitability, concentration and competition, internal organization and regional employment concentration. Other questions considered include the economic importance of weapons exports, the defense industry as a ‘leading edge’ in maintaining national technological capabilities, and the reliance of individual firms on defense contracting.

Russian officials claim today that the USSR never possessed an offensive biological weapons program. In fact, the Soviet government spent billions of rubles and hard currency to fund a hugely expensive weapons program that added nothing to the country’s security. This history is the first attempt to understand the broad scope of the USSR’s offensive biological weapons research—its inception in the 1920s, its growth between 1970 and 1990, and its possible remnants in present-day Russia. We learn that the U.S. and U.K. governments never obtained clear evidence of the program’s closure from 1990 to the present day, raising the critical question whether the means for waging biological warfare could be resurrected in Russia in the future.Based on interviews with important Soviet scientists and managers, papers from the Soviet Central Committee, and U.S. and U.K. declassified documents, this book peels back layers of lies, to reveal how and why Soviet leaders decided to develop biological weapons, the scientific resources they dedicated to this task, and the multitude of research institutes that applied themselves to its fulfillment. We learn that Biopreparat, an ostensibly civilian organization, was established to manage a top secret program, code-named Ferment, whose objective was to apply genetic engineering to develop strains of pathogenic agents that had never existed in nature. Leitenberg and Zilinskas consider the performance of the U.S. intelligence community in discovering and assessing these activities, and they examine in detail the crucial years 1985 to 1992, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to put an end to the program were thwarted as they were under Yeltsin.