 | This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification .(May 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) |
Robbin Laird | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1946 |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | Columbia University |
| Occupation | defense analyst |
Robbin F. Laird (born 1946) is a military and security analyst.
He has taught at Columbia University, Queens College, Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University. He worked with The Center for Defense Analysis and the Institute for Defense Analysis. He is a member of the Board of Contributors of AOL Defense and writes for The Diplomat. [1] He is the director of the ICSA, LLC since 2000 and co-founder of the website Second Line of Defense, since 2010 and of Defense.info since 2018. [2] He is the editor of two defense websites, Second Line of Defense and Defense Information. He became a fellow of The Williams Foundation, Canberra, Australia in 2018.
The Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO), officially the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, commonly known as the Warsaw Pact (WP), was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern Bloc socialist republics of Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact was the military complement to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CoMEcon), the regional economic organization for the socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Pact was created in reaction to the integration of West Germany into NATO in 1955 per the London and Paris Conferences of 1954, but it is also considered to have been motivated by Soviet desires to maintain control over military forces in Central and Eastern Europe.
Mutually assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. It is based on the theory of deterrence, which holds that the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons. The strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium in which, once armed, neither side has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to disarm.
Brinkmanship is the practice of trying to achieve an advantageous outcome by pushing dangerous events to the brink of active conflict. It occurs in international politics, foreign policy, labor relations, and military strategy involving the threat of nuclear weapons, and high-stakes litigation. This maneuver of pushing a situation with the opponent to the brink succeeds by forcing the opponent to back down and make concessions. This might be achieved through diplomatic maneuvers by creating the impression that one is willing to use extreme methods rather than concede. The term is chiefly associated with American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, during the early years of the administration of US President Dwight D Eisenhower (1953-1956). Dulles sought to deter aggression by the Soviet Union by warning that the cost might be massive retaliation against Soviet targets.
Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko was a Soviet Belarusian communist politician and diplomat during the Cold War. He served as Minister of Foreign Affairs (1957–1985) and as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (1985–1988). Gromyko was responsible for many top decisions on Soviet foreign policy until he retired in 1988. In the 1940s Western pundits called him Mr. Nyet or "Grim Grom", because of his frequent use of the Soviet veto in the United Nations Security Council.
Détente is the relaxation of strained relations, especially political, by verbal communication. The term, in diplomacy, originates from around 1912 when France and Germany tried unsuccessfully to reduce tensions.
Harold Brown was an American nuclear physicist who served as United States Secretary of Defense from 1977 to 1981, under President Jimmy Carter. Previously, in the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations, he held the posts of Director of Defense Research and Engineering (1961–1965) and United States Secretary of the Air Force (1965–1969).
Paul Henry Nitze was an American politician who served as United States Deputy Secretary of Defense, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department. He is best known for being the principal author of NSC 68 and the co-founder of Team B. He helped shape Cold War defense policy over the course of numerous presidential administrations.
The Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) was the United States' general plan for nuclear war from 1961 to 2003. The SIOP gave the President of the United States a range of targeting options, and described launch procedures and target sets against which nuclear weapons would be launched. The plan integrated the capabilities of the nuclear triad of strategic bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), and sea-based submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM). The SIOP was a highly classified document, and was one of the most secret and sensitive issues in U.S. national security policy.
Ashton Baldwin Carter is an American public policy professor who served as the 25th secretary of defense from February 2015 to January 2017. He is currently Director of the Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.
After the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks took over the old Russian Empire in 1918, they faced enormous odds against the German Empire due to World War I, and then again against both domestic and international enemies in the bitter civil war. Tsarist Russia was reorganized as the Soviet Union in 1922. At first, it was treated as an unrecognized Pariah state because of its repudiating the tsarist debts and threats to destroy capitalism at home and around the world. By 1922, Moscow had repudiated the goal of world revolution, and sought diplomatic recognition and friendly trade relations with the world, starting with Britain and Germany. Trade and technical help from Germany and the United States arrived in the late 1920s. Under dictator Joseph Stalin, the country was transformed in the 1930s into an industrial and military power. After the appeasement policy of Britain and France, the Soviet Union shifted from a strategy of antifascist collective security to one of national security. By signing a treaty with Germany in 1939 the Soviet Union hoped to create a buffer zone between them and Germany. In 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union that reached the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow. However, the Soviet Union proved strong enough to defeat Nazi Germany, with help from its key allies.
The Cold War (1979–1985) refers to a late phase of the Cold War marked by a sharp increase in hostility between the Soviet Union and the West. It arose from a strong denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. With the election of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and American President Ronald Reagan in 1980, a corresponding change in Western foreign policy approach toward the Soviet Union was marked by the rejection of détente in favor of the Reagan Doctrine policy of rollback, with the stated goal of dissolving Soviet influence in Soviet Bloc countries. During this time, the threat of nuclear war had reached new heights not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
The Cold War period of 1985–1991 began with the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was a revolutionary leader for the USSR, as he was the first to promote liberalization of the political landscape (Glasnost) and the economy (Perestroika); prior to this, the USSR had been strictly prohibiting liberal reform and maintained an inefficient command economy. The USSR, despite facing massive economic difficulties, was involved in a costly arms race with the United States under President Ronald Reagan. Regardless, the USSR began to crumble as liberal reforms proved difficult to handle and capitalist changes to the economy were badly instituted and caused major problems. The Cold War came to an end when the last war of Soviet occupation ended in Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall came down in Germany, and a series of mostly peaceful revolutions swept the Soviet Bloc states of eastern Europe in 1989.
The foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration was the foreign policy of the United States from 1981 to 1989. The main goal was winning the Cold War and the rollback of Communism—which was achieved in the Revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe during 1989 and in the Dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Historians debate whom to credit, and how much. They agree that victory in the Cold War made the U.S. the world's only superpower, one with good relations with former Communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe.
The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response is a 1983 pastoral letter of the American Catholic bishops addressing the issue of war and peace in a nuclear age. It reviewed the Catholic Church's teachings about peace and war, reaffirmed the “just war” theory as the main principles for evaluating the use of military force, acknowledged the legitimacy of nonviolence as an alternative moral framework for individuals, evaluated the current issues in US defense policy, and proposed a series of actions that individuals could undertake.
Guinea-Bissau–Russia relations is the bilateral foreign relations between the two countries, Guinea-Bissau and Russia.
The energy policy of the Soviet Union was an important feature of the country's planned economy from the time of Lenin onward. The Soviet Union was virtually self-sufficient in energy; major development of the energy sector started with Stalin's autarky policy of the 1920s. During the country's 70 years of existence (1922-1991), it primarily secured economic growth based on large inputs of natural resources. But by the 1960s this method had become less efficient. In contrast to other nations who shared the same experience, technological innovation was not strong enough to replace the energy sector in importance.
Dr. Dmitri Vitalyevich Trenin, PhD is the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, a think tank and regional affiliate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A former colonel of Russian military intelligence, Trenin served for 21 years in the Soviet Army and Russian Ground Forces, before joining Carnegie in 1994
Dr. Alexei Georgievich Arbatov, PhD is a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Head of the Center for International Security at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), and a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center. He is a Russian political scientist, academic, author, and former politician.
The Tokyo Express is a term for regular flights by Soviet military aircraft past Japan. They sometimes involve violations of Japanese airspace and have often been intercepted by fighter aircraft of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force.
The Murmansk Initiative was a series of wide-range foreign policy proposals concerning the Arctic region made in a speech by the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - Mikhail Gorbachev - on October 1, 1987 in Murmansk, Soviet Union, considered to be a trademark of his foreign policy.
