Editor's Note

This issue begins with an article by Ken Young on the genesis of U.S.-British joint nuclear war planning in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Throughout the Cold War, no issue of national security for either the United States or Great Britain was more sensitive than the elaborate preparations needed to wage a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Although a "special relationship" between Britain and the United States was firmly in place by the time the British acquired their first nuclear weapons in the early 1950s, joint nuclear attack planning did not begin until nearly a decade later. From the outset, the commanders of Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) were more enthusiastic about the concept of joint nuclear targeting than were the generals who headed the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC), the organ of the U.S. military responsible for nuclear war planning and deployments. Even though British officials and RAF commanders wanted to preserve the "independence" of Britain's nuclear bomber force, they believed that joint nuclear preparations would be crucial to deter a Soviet attack and would also give them a clearer sense of U.S. nuclear war plans—plans that until the mid-1950s depended heavily on U.S. bombers that would take off from bases in Britain. SAC, however, was notoriously reluctant to divulge any information about its war plans even to the closest U.S. allies. Not until the mid-1950s, when RAF Bomber Command acquired a larger number of V-type bombers and reconfigured more of its aircraft for delivery of U.S.-made nuclear weapons, did serious negotiations on the matter really get under way. From 1955 through late 1957, U.S. and British officers held a series of discussions that gradually overcame the obstacles to a coordinated nuclear strike plan, including an integrated list of target specifications and priorities. The role of RAF Bomber Command in these new arrangements was clearly a subordinate one. British nuclear forces maintained a veneer of "independence," but by the early 1960s they were in fact fully integrated into SAC's general nuclear war plan (the details of which were still mostly withheld from the RAF). Nonetheless, the benefits of joint preparations were so important for British defense policy that British officials and military commanders readily accepted SAC's dominant role.

The next article, by Jeronim Perović provides a reassessment of the split that emerged between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in mid-1948. The Soviet-Yugoslav rift has been the subject of extensive scrutiny over the past six decades, but until recently all analyses of this topic were based solely on publicly available sources, including documents selectively released by the Yugoslav government. Since the early 1990s, however, opportunities for research on the Soviet-Yugoslav conflict have expanded enormously. Although some crucial documents in Russia have not yet been released, a vast trove of archival evidence is now accessible in Moscow, Belgrade, and other former East-bloc capitals. A huge amount of declassified documentation is also available in Western countries, especially the United States. Over the past fifteen years, specialists in numerous countries have been able to piece together a more detailed and more accurate picture of the events that drove the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia apart. Perović shows that the official Yugoslav historiography on this matter prior to the 1990s was highly misleading in its suggestion that the primary source of the schism was Yugoslavia's supposed effort to pursue its own road to socialism, a road that did not yet actually exist. Until the rift emerged, the leader of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, regarded himself as a devout follower and staunch ally of the Soviet Communist regime headed by Josif Stalin. Tito was intent on setting up a full-fledged Stalinist system in Yugoslavia and was certainly not pursuing his "own road to socialism." In reality, the most important factor precipitating the Soviet-Yugoslav split was the growing tension between Moscow and Belgrade over Yugoslavia's policy in the Balkans, especially toward Albania. Stalin was particularly angered by Tito's failure to obtain Soviet permission before taking certain actions in the Balkans. Stalin and...