"We live, sometimes dangerously," writes John Erickson, "in an age jammed asymmetrically between the time of the possession of global weapons and that of the retention, not to say the reinforcement, of local loyalties. The substance of a once-familiar stability has been consumed with fiery abruptness by the onset and the cumulative technical triumphs of the 'military revolution' that centers around nuclear weaponry."

In October, 1964, only a few days after the world had been startled by news of Khrushchev's fall and the explosion of China's first atomic device, American and European specialists met in Munich to discuss the impact of the modern military revolution on strategy and foreign policy. What is the effect of nuclear weaponry on traditional military theory and strategy? they asked. How will the nuclear revolution affect the future course of world events?

THE MILITARY-TECHNICAL REVOLUTION is a unified collection of carefully revised and updated papers that were selected from those that were presented at the Munich symposium—a conference sponsored by the Institute for the Study of the USSR. Focusing on the major themes discussed by the symposium participants, it includes essays by seventeen internationally respected strategists and military writers. From varying points of view—American, British, French, German, and Russian—the contributors define the positions adopted by the principal protagonists in the nuclear dilemma. With frequent reference to the military-political crises of the past decade—the Berlin question, the Cuban confrontation, the Sino-Soviet dispute, and the conflict in Vietnam—their essays probe the manner in which nuclear weapons have influenced the foreign policies and alliances of the major world powers. The questions explored by this survey of military and political interaction in the nuclear age range from an evaluation of conventional warfare to an outline of the new concepts of psychostrategy, from the threat of escalation in limited wars to the impact of nuclear weapons on counterinsurgency techniques, from the role of neutralism in the Cold War to the meaning and effectiveness of a nuclear deterrent.

Edited by John Erickson, a noted military historian, THE MILITARY-TECHNICAL REVOLUTION brings together some of the most sophisticated thinking on the nuclear question. Each contributor provides provocative insights into the new rules of political and military strategy that the world was suddenly compelled to learn after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.