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The American Search for Peace
Moral Reasoning, Religious Hope, and National Security
George S. Weigel Jr. and John P. Langan, SJ, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 1991

Revolutions and aborted revolutions and bitter civil and "local" wars in the 1980s and since have raised new questions about national security, its definition, and its implementation. Nevertheless, a number of basic philosophical and political issues remain constant at a level deeper than tactical considerations. These are what eight accomplished philosophers, political scientists, Christian ethicists, and policymakers came together to discuss. They ask the fundamental and perduring questions of pacifism, war, intervention, and political negotiation. They focus on such problems as ascertaining the role of the churches in the quest for peace, defining "national interest" and "national purpose," and construing intervention in other that strictly unilateral terms.

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Climate Change and National Security
A Country-Level Analysis
Daniel Moran, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 2011

In this unique and innovative contribution to environmental security, an international team of scholars explore and estimate the intermediate-term security risks that climate change may pose for the United States, its allies and partners, and for regional and global order through the year 2030. In profiles of forty-two key countries and regions, each contributor considers the problems that climate change will pose for existing institutions and practices. By focusing on the conduct of individual states or groups of nations, the results add new precision to our understanding of the way environmental stress may be translated into political, social, economic, and military challenges in the future.

Countries and regions covered in the book include China, Vietnam, The Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Central Asia, the European Union, the Persian Gulf, Egypt, Turkey, the Maghreb, West Africa, Southern Africa, the Northern Andes, and Brazil.

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Controlling the Sword
The Democratic Governance of National Security
Bruce Russett
Harvard University Press

One of our nation's leading interpreters of national security policymaking shows how public opinion, operating in democratic political systems, shapes and constrains decisions about national security. Bruce Russett maintains that elected leaders, and their supporters and rivals, must realize that foreign policy and security policy are largely determined by domestic politics; the political leader who ignores domestic politics finds it difficult to get things done internationally, risks repudiation at the polls, and fails to exploit real or symbolic successes abroad that could reinforce his standing at home.

Russett also debunks several Washington myths: that the public is too confused and ignorant about security issues to deserve influence over national security policy; that the public is easily manipulated; that public opinion is hopelessly volatile, swinging irrationally between indifference and hysteria, hawk and dove. He shows how electoral politics encourages tough talk and tough action; how policymaking and public opinion interact; how the public balances extremes of warmongering and appeasement; and how democratic political systems are prepared to compromise their differences with other democratic countries, to avoid making hard enemies of them.

Timely, insightful, almost an advanced primer for understanding national policymaking in our most challenging and frightening sphere, this book will be of interest to policymakers, journalists, legislators, and concerned readers in general.

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Cyberspace and National Security
Threats, Opportunities, and Power in a Virtual World
Derek S. Reveron, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 2012

In a very short time, individuals and companies have harnessed cyberspace to create new industries, a vibrant social space, and a new economic sphere that are intertwined with our everyday lives. At the same time, individuals, subnational groups, and governments are using cyberspace to advance interests through malicious activity. Terrorists recruit, train, and target through the Internet, hackers steal data, and intelligence services conduct espionage. Still, the vast majority of cyberspace is civilian space used by individuals, businesses, and governments for legitimate purposes.

Cyberspace and National Security brings together scholars, policy analysts, and information technology executives to examine current and future threats to cyberspace. They discuss various approaches to advance and defend national interests, contrast the US approach with European, Russian, and Chinese approaches, and offer new ways and means to defend interests in cyberspace and develop offensive capabilities to compete there. Policymakers and strategists will find this book to be an invaluable resource in their efforts to ensure national security and answer concerns about future cyberwarfare.

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Economics and National Security
A History of Their Interaction, Volume 23
Craufurd D. W. Goodwin
Duke University Press, 1991

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The Greening of the U.S. Military
Environmental Policy, National Security, and Organizational Change
Robert F. Durant
Georgetown University Press, 2007

By the Cold War's end, U.S. military bases harbored nearly 20,000 toxic waste sites. All told, cleaning the approximately 27 million acres is projected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. And yet while progress has been made, efforts to integrate environmental and national security concerns into the military's operations have proven a daunting and intrigue-filled task that has fallen short of professed goals in the post-Cold War era.

In The Greening of the U.S. Military, Robert F. Durant delves into this too-little understood world of defense environmental policy to uncover the epic and ongoing struggle to build an environmentally sensitive culture within the post-Cold War military. Through over 100 interviews and thousands of pages of documents, reports, and trade newsletter accounts, he offers a telling tale of political, bureaucratic, and intergovernmental combat over the pace, scope, and methods of applying environmental and natural resource laws while ensuring military readiness. He then discerns from these clashes over principle, competing values, and narrow self-interest a theoretical framework for studying and understanding organizational change in public organizations. From Dick Cheney's days as Defense Secretary under President George H. W. Bush to William Cohen's Clinton-era-tenure and on to Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the battle over "greening" the military has been one with high-stakes consequences for both national defense and public health, safety, and the environment. Durant's polity-centered perspective and arguments will evoke needed scrutiny, debate, and dialogue over these issues in environmental, military, policymaking, and academic circles.

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Growing American Rubber
Strategic Plants and the Politics of National Security
Finlay, Mark R
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Growing American Rubber explores America's quest during tense decades of the twentieth century to identify a viable source of domestic rubber. Straddling international revolutions and world wars, this unique and well-researched history chronicles efforts of leaders in business, science, and government to sever American dependence on foreign suppliers. Mark Finlay plots out intersecting networks of actors including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, prominent botanists, interned Japanese Americans, Haitian peasants, and ordinary citizensùall of whom contributed to this search for economic self-sufficiency. Challenging once-familiar boundaries between agriculture and industry and field and laboratory, Finlay also identifies an era in which perceived boundaries between natural and synthetic came under review.

Although synthetic rubber emerged from World War II as one solution, the issue of ever-diminishing natural resources and the question of how to meet twenty-first-century consumer, military, and business demands lingers today.

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Growing American Rubber
Strategic Plants and the Politics of National Security
Finlay, Mark R
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Growing American Rubber explores America's quest during tense decades of the twentieth century to identify a viable source of domestic rubber. Straddling international revolutions and world wars, this unique and well-researched history chronicles efforts of leaders in business, science, and government to sever American dependence on foreign suppliers. Mark Finlay plots out intersecting networks of actors including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, prominent botanists, interned Japanese Americans, Haitian peasants, and ordinary citizensùall of whom contributed to this search for economic self-sufficiency. Challenging once-familiar boundaries between agriculture and industry and field and laboratory, Finlay also identifies an era in which perceived boundaries between natural and synthetic came under review.

Although synthetic rubber emerged from World War II as one solution, the issue of ever-diminishing natural resources and the question of how to meet twenty-first-century consumer, military, and business demands lingers today.

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In the Name of National Security
Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America
Robert J. Corber
Duke University Press, 1993
In the Name of National Security exposes the ways in which the films of Alfred Hitchcock, in conjunction with liberal intellectuals and political figures of the 1950s, fostered homophobia so as to politicize issues of gender in the United States.
As Corber shows, throughout the 1950s a cast of mind known as the Cold War consensus prevailed in the United States. Promoted by Cold War liberals--that is, liberals who wanted to perserve the legacies of the New Deal but also wished to separate liberalism from a Communist-dominated cultural politics--this consensus was grounded in the perceived threat that Communists, lesbians, and homosexuals posed to national security. Through an analysis of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, combined with new research on the historical context in which these films were produced, Corber shows how Cold War liberals tried to contain the increasing heterogeneity of American society by linking questions of gender and sexual identity directly to issues of national security, a strategic move that the films of Hitchcock both legitimated and at times undermined. Drawing on psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, Corber looks at such films as Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, and Psycho to show how Hitchcock manipulated viewers' attachments and identifications to foster and reinforce the relationship between homophobia and national security issues.
A revisionary account of Hitchcock's major works, In the Name of National Security is also of great interest for what it reveals about the construction of political "reality" in American history.
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Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America
Mario Daniels and John Krige
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The first historical study of export control regulations as a tool for the sharing and withholding of knowledge.

In this groundbreaking book, Mario Daniels and John Krige set out to show the enormous political relevance that export control regulations have had for American debates about national security, foreign policy, and trade policy since 1945. Indeed, they argue that from the 1940s to today the issue of how to control the transnational movement of information has been central to the thinking and actions of the guardians of the American national security state. The expansion of control over knowledge and know-how is apparent from the increasingly systematic inclusion of universities and research institutions into a system that in the 1950s and 1960s mainly targeted business activities. As this book vividly reveals, classification was not the only—and not even the most important—regulatory instrument that came into being in the postwar era.
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Nonfuel Minerals
Foreign Dependence and National Security
Raymond F. Mikesell
University of Michigan Press, 1987
In an uncertain international economic environment, the United States is increasingly dependent upon foreign suppliers for many things, including nonfuel minerals. This book deals with the major problems and policy issues involved with these minerals. The major problems concern the medium- and long-term availability of world supplies, the competitive structure of nonfuel mineral industries, and the location of world production and consumption. Special attention is given to the production of nonfuel minerals in developing countries and the role of foreign investment in Third World mineral industries. The major policy issues include reducing U.S. vulnerability to disruption of imports of nonfuel minerals; subsidizing, or protecting against imports, domestic producers of nonfuel minerals; conflicts between environmentalists and the mining industry; and international issues such as the Law of the Sea Treaty, international stabilization of metal prices, and international loans to Third World metal-producing countries. While the treatment of conflicting policy positions is objective, the author comes out on the side of unrestricted competition in world markets, including elimination of domestic subsidies to import barriers, the use of economic stockpiles to reduce vulnerability to import disruption, and maintenance of strict environmental pollution standards. The author is optimistic about the long-run outlook for mineral supplies necessary to meet world requirements for economic growth. United States domestic mineral independence may be unnecessary in terms of national security and too costly to consumers and the environment.
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Power without Constraint
The Post-9/11 Presidency and National Security
Chris Edelson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama criticized the George W. Bush administration for its unrestrained actions in matters of national security. In secret Justice Department memos, President Bush’s officials had claimed for the executive branch total authority to use military force in response to threats of terrorism. They set aside laws made by Congress, even criminal laws prohibiting torture and warrantless surveillance. Candidate Obama promised to restore the rule of law and make a clean break with the Bush approach. President Obama has not done so. Why?
            In a thorough comparison of the Bush and Obama administrations’ national security policies, Chris Edelson demonstrates that President Obama and his officials have used softer rhetoric and toned-down legal arguments, but in key areas—military action, surveillance, and state secrets—they have simply found new ways to assert power without meaningful constitutional or statutory constraints.
            Edelson contends that this legacy of the two immediately post-9/11 presidencies raises crucial questions for future presidents, Congress, the courts, and American citizens. Where is the political will to restore a balance of powers among branches of government and adherence to the rule of law? What are the limits of authority regarding presidential national security power? Have national security concerns created a permanent shift to unconstrained presidential power?
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Secret Service
National Security in an Age of Open Information
Jonathan Evans
Haus Publishing, 2020
In Secret Service, former Director Deneral of the British Security Service Jonathan Evans reveals how he balanced two apparently irreconcilable pressures during his tenure with MI5: state secrecy and public transparency. Despite popular perception, Evans argues, these values need not be at odds. Intelligence and the press share many goals, and partnerships formed on these grounds often prove fruitful. In disclosing his methods, Evans compares his approach with other agencies, especially in the United States, and speculates on the UK’s post-Brexit collaborations with European security services. In short, Secret Service presents an on-the-ground picture of life in British intelligence, one that calls us to care for the moral health of both the institution and its operatives.
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Securing the Sacred
Religion, National Security, and the Western State
Robert M. Bosco
University of Michigan Press, 2014
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Western nations have increasingly recognized religion as a consideration in domestic and foreign policy. In this empirical comparison of the securitization of Islam in Britain, France, and the United States, Robert M. Bosco argues that religion is a category of phenomena defined by the discourses and politics of both religious and state elites.

Despite significant theoretical distinctions between securitization on the domestic and the international levels, he finds that the outcome of addressing religion within the context of security hinges upon partnerships. Whereas states may harness the power of international allies, they cannot often find analogous domestic allies; therefore, states that attempt to securitize religion at home are more vulnerable to counterattack and more likely to abandon their efforts. Securing the Sacred makes a significant contribution to the fields of political theory, international relations, Islamic studies, and security/military studies.

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Strategic Power and National Security
J. I. Coffey
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971

In this closely reasoned and lucid analysis, an important thinker on American strategy surveys weapons technology and its military and political implications for the 1970s. J. I. Coffey refutes the argument that American national security requires “superior” strategic offensive forces or extensive air and missile defenses. In so doing he assesses in simple terms the various factors involved in this complex and difficult subject.


While many books on strategy deal only with a single area or a particular weapons system, this work synthesizes technical and non-technical considerations across the whole range of national security issues affected by strategic power-war-fighting, deterrence, Communist behavior, alliance relationships, nuclear proliferation, and arms control. Its orderly and authoritative marshaling of tabulated data, its citations from Department of Defense documents and congressional hearings, and its classifications of the alternative options which strategy makers can now pursue, are all invaluable to both the student of national security and the professional strategist.
 

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