The US War Machine and Politics

An institutional history of the American national security state: the 1947 National Security Act, the unification of the armed services, the making of nuclear strategy, and the political weight of the Secretary of Defense.

Radomir Bogdanov wrote from inside the Soviet Americanist establishment and built the book almost entirely out of American sources, citing Arbatov and Trofimenko in the way one cites colleagues. On the machinery - how the Pentagon was actually organised, how strategy was formulated between the services and the civilian secretariat, and how the budget process shaped doctrine - it is a serious piece of work.

The dating is the thing to hold. The Russian original is a Nauka book of 1983, and the English is described as a translation of a revised text. The revision can be measured: the latest events named are the invasion of Grenada in October 1983, the mining of Nicaraguan harbours in early 1984, and the shelling of Lebanese villages; the most recent Soviet authority quoted at length is Chernenko in February 1984; and the single reference to Gorbachev anywhere in the book is one quotation from the March 1985 plenum, dropped into the final pages.

So: a 1983 monograph revised through 1984, with one 1985 paragraph welded to the end. It does not contain the phrase Strategic Defense Initiative, though SDI had been announced in March 1983 and was, by the year of publication, the obstacle around which every arms-control argument turned.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.