Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/May 2022/Book reviews


 * By Hawkeye7

As the title announces, the Bretton Woods Conference was one of the most important of the Second World War II. Although overshadowed by the Yalta Conference that established the postwar political structure of Europe, Bretton Woods created the economic structures of the postwar world. Winning the war was all-important; but creating a lasting peace was considered no less so. The flawed peace that ended the First World War had led to the chaos of the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and ultimately a Second World War in the 1940s. It was a bitter and frightening experience that no one wanted to repeat.

In July 1944, representatives of 44 nations assembled at the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire to craft a new economic world order. Although not attended by any national leaders, many of the delegates would go on to become prime ministers of their countries. These would include France's Pierre Mendès France and Greece's Andreas Papandreou. Papandreou's son George Papandreou, elected to the same office, would later have to accept a bail out from the institution his father helped to create.

Overshadowing them all was the head of the British delegation, the most famous economist of all time, John Maynard Keynes. He dominated the discussions intellectually, but Britain was in a weak economic position. The brilliant but eccentric Keynes chaired Commission II, the discussions that dealt with the formation of what became the World Bank. The chief American negotiator was Harry Dexter White, who chaired Commission I, which drew up the charter for what became the International Monetary Fund. He was also a Russian agent. The Soviet delegation included Nikolai Fyodorovich Chechulin, the vice chairman of Gosbank. He was young, good looking, charming and, unlike the rest of the Soviet delegation, spoke perfect English, which should have tipped everyone off that he was NKVD.

And these are just the start of the cast of colourful characters that the author weaves through the narrative in a well-written and lucid account, all the while discussing in layman's terms the history of the gold standard, how the First World War upset the global economy, the story of how it fared and failed between the wars, and the details of the agreement that was hammered out. Meetings went well past midnight. They were conducted in conference rooms, but also in private rooms, corridors and bars. There were innumerable dinners and cocktail parties. Keynes predicted that alcoholic poisoning would set in before the conference ended, but the Russians took this as an invitation.

The Bretton Woods system would last for over 25 years, and ushered in the period of relative peace, prosperity and stability. Many aspects remain with us today, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank). The final two chapters of the book bring the story up to the present day.

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 * By Hawkeye7



This book is about the American civil space program in the 1980s. It doesn't cover the military space programs, the most notable one of the period being the Strategic Defense Initiative. Nonetheless, there is much in this book that the military history reader might appreciate. This is the third of a series of studies of high-level space policy decisions by space historian John Logsdon, after John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (2010) and ''After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program'' (2015). Whereas those books centred around big decisions, the decision to go the Moon and the decision to build the Space Shuttle respectively, this book, like the American space program in the 1980s, lacks that sort of focus.

So what decisions were taken by Reagan regarding the space program? The biggest one was probably the decision to build what eventually became the International Space Station. Like the Space Shuttle decision, this had the long-term effect of taking the American space program down a dead end street. In those dying days of the Cold War, the United States still cared about how it was seen by other countries. The space station was seen as a means of demonstrating American technological superiority, although there was considerable doubt as to whether America actually had technological superiority.

Similarly, demonstrating America's capacity for leadership was always going to problematic in the absence of any stated national goals or directions. An important consideration was the degree to which cooperation would be invited from other countries. There was concern that this would result in technology transfer to rivals. A major concern was the challenge from Europe by Arianespace and its Ariane rockets. This affected debates on pricing for Space Shuttle launches.

Another decision was to confirm the Space Shuttle as the United States' primary launch platform for both civil and military purposes. This decision was of great concern to the (then still secret) National Reconnaissance Office, which doubted that NASA could meet its commitment of 24 Space Shuttle launches per annum (it never came close). In the wake of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the policy of using the Space Shuttle for launching commercial satellites was abandoned. It also ended the Teacher in Space Project and the related Journalist in Space Project. There was also the attempt to privatise Landsat program and the weather satellite network on ideological grounds. The latter never occurred, being economically impractical and politically infeasible, and the former flopped so badly that Landsat to be re-nationalised, a quite unusual occurrence in the United States.

This book paints a clear and compelling portrait of Reagan, who is often maligned or misunderstood. More importantly for the historian, it describes the process of decision making in his administration. Decisions would usually be debated at length by officials before being brought to Reagan for a final decision. In meetings at which he was present, he avoided indicating what he thought, lest that carry undue weight and adversely affect the process of considering alternatives.

A high point of Reagan's presidency was his handling of the Challenger disaster, during which he eloquently articulated the shock and grief felt by Americans, and his sympathy and empathy for the families of the crew, holding the memorial service in Houston for their benefit.

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