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This chapter details the 1976 Argentine coup d’état. When the commanders of the three branches of the Argentine service announced the inauguration of the “National Reorganization Process,” few Argentines expressed genuine surprise as it was an open secret that military preparations for a political takeover had advanced to the final stage, with meticulous orders distributed to units across Argentina. When the military assumed power on March 24, 1976, U.S. ambassador Robert C. Hill offered full and definite support. This support for the Argentine military takeover exemplified a defining feature of U.S. policy toward Latin America during the Cold War: quiet cultivation of strong ties with politically ambitious Latin America militaries to protect U.S. national security.

This chapter considers the end of the Cold War as well as its implications for the September 11 attacks in 2001, roughly a decade after the Cold War ended. While studying the Cold War, the chapter illustrates how memory and values as well as fear and power shaped the behavior of human agents. Throughout that struggle, the divergent lessons of World War II pulsated through policymaking circles in Moscow and Washington. Now, in the aftermath of 9/11, governments around the world drew upon the lessons they had learned from their divergent national experiences as those experiences had become embedded in their respective national memories. For policymakers in Washington, memories of the Cold War and dreams of human freedom tempted the use of excessive power with tragic consequences. Memory, culture, and values played a key role in shaping the evolution of U.S. national security policy.

This chapter examines the indicators used by the Reagan administration to assess the intentions of the Soviet Union between 1985 and 1988. Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1981 after an election campaign that expressed alarm over a “window of vulnerability” that endangered U.S. national security. Reagan's national security strategy featured schemes such as the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The chapter considers U.S. perceptions of Soviet military capabilities, military doctrine, and behavior during the period based on predictions derived from the selective attention thesis, capabilities thesis, strategic military doctrine thesis, and behavior thesis. It also explores how, when, and to what extent U.S. perceptions of Soviet intentions changed in order to elucidate the broader changes that eventually led to the end of the Cold War.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the relationship between Laos and U.S. policy. The U.S. policy toward Laos under Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy shaped America’s approach to Southeast Asia during the cold war. Laos was the testing ground for counterinsurgency and nation-building programs that emerged in Vietnam, and many of the features that distinguished later programs—support of unpopular but pro-Western despots, matches between U.S. civilian and military bureaucracies, and ignorance of the needs and problems of the native populations—first became known in Laos. Indeed, Laos occupied more of Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s time than Vietnam. The “Kingdom of a Million Elephants” was considered essential to America’s national security and a vital piece in the fight between communism and anticommunism.

Legal, foreign policy, and operational harms call into question the narrative that the United States is better off as a result of inhumane detainee treatment. This chapter explores how the life cycle of norms applies to policy and whether a new normative consensus has been reached on the issue of detainee treatment. It concludes by offering several policy recommendations and future avenues of research for scholarship.

The present chapter explores RAND’s development of analytical management techniques for military purposes and the diffusion of these methodologies from the military context into broader social welfare policy-making applications. It concentrates on three main issues, first providing a brief discussion of RAND’s history, focusing on the processes of intellectual production at RAND and the ways in which the creation of techniques there was shaped by a military context. Second, the chapter traces the dissemination of RAND’s systems methodologies from the corporation’s quasi-academic setting to the highest echelons of the U.S. national security structure. Finally, it examines where and how RAND’s methodological innovations diffused beyond the military establishment into programs of the “Great Society.” In general, the chapter traces the consequences of Cold War technical development for American democracy and argues that the widespread adoption of centralized, elitist policy making in the federal government may have contributed to the alienation many Americans feel toward the national government.

This chapter examines the national security issues in the implementation of the requirements of the Fourth Amendment in the U.S. It discusses the complexities of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) and the ways that the Patriot Act have provided the executive branch ever-greater latitude in the use of national security powers. It suggests that measures weaken the Fourth Amendment's central mechanisms, accountability and oversight, often undermine public safety and increase the exposure of the American citizens to attack.

This chapter discusses Eisenhower's televised efforts to “calm” the American public after the Sputnik launch. He gave a series of nationally televised speeches on science and national security, assuring the public that there was no crisis, that no rash action or legislative program was needed. General Andrew Goodpaster noted that this effort—dubbed as Operation Confidence—aims to restore the public confidence in the U.S. national security, and prevent “crash programs that would be unnecessary, that would be very wasteful and misdirected.” By setting the proper tone and invoking the right words, he hoped to banish the Sputnik issue from the news.

This chapter discusses Eisenhower's response to the Gaither Committee's ominous report concerning the U.S. national security. The committee conducted a massive review of the country's defense posture, examining whether the United States could survive a nuclear first strike from the Soviet Union and retaliate. The results show that a Soviet first strike would destroy up to 50 percent of the American population. Eisenhower, thus, assigned the Gaither Committee to enhance America's offensive missile capabilities. Furthermore, the committee was tasked to create a network of fallout shelters—not merely bomb shelters to shield citizens from blasts—to protect Americans from radioactivity after a nuclear attack.

This chapter examines methods for translating different languages through a machine. There are issues with machine translation that can be illustrated through historic examples. Firstly, the need to match and exceed the pace of Soviet’s scientific innovation and the insufficiency of workers that read and translated intercepted information. The chapter also discusses the failure of the U.S National Security Agency (NSA) to translate information from the Soviet Union’s radio satellite, Sputnik I, which indicates that machine translation (MT) of language can have drawbacks. Automated translation of captured enemy documentation, amassed in material form, needed to be read in a manner that most efficiently extracts its embodied content. The failure of high-tech input-output systems to accommodate Language is called “information pathology.”.