Arms, economics and British strategy : from dreadnoughts to hyrdrogen bombs

Author(s)

    • Peden, G. C.

Bibliographic Information

Arms, economics and British strategy : from dreadnoughts to hyrdrogen bombs

G.C. Peden

(Cambridge military histories / edited by Hew Strachan, Geoffrey Wawro)

Cambridge University Press, 2007

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Note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

This book integrates strategy, technology and economics and presents a new way of looking at twentieth-century military history and Britain's decline as a great power. G. C. Peden explores how from the Edwardian era to the 1960s warfare was transformed by a series of innovations, including dreadnoughts, submarines, aircraft, tanks, radar, nuclear weapons and guided missiles. He shows that the cost of these new weapons tended to rise more quickly than national income and argues that strategy had to be adapted to take account of both the increased potency of new weapons and the economy's diminishing ability to sustain armed forces of a given size. Prior to the development of nuclear weapons, British strategy was based on an ability to wear down an enemy through blockade, attrition (in the First World War) and strategic bombing (in the Second), and therefore power rested as much on economic strength as on armaments.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • 1. The Dreadnought era, 1904-14
  • 2. The First World War
  • 3. Retrenchment and rearmament, 1919-39
  • 4. The Second World War
  • 5. The impacts of the atomic bomb and the Cold War, 1945-54
  • 6. The hydrogen bomb, the economy and decolonisation, 1954-69
  • Conclusion
  • Select bibliography
  • Index.

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