Acquisitions

Roger Beaumont. Might Backed by Right: The International Air Force Concept. Westport and London: Praeger, 2001. Some library gap-filling: it's the only book on the history of the international air force idea there is, so I ought to have it. Doesn't devote enough attention to the 1920s and 1930s for my liking, but for once I at least did something about it rather than just sat back and complained.

Matthew Grant. After the Bomb: Civil Defence and Nuclear War in Britain, 1945-68. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. One I've been looking forward to for a while. But why aren't there any similar books on ARP?

George H. Quester. Deterrence Before Hiroshima: The Airpower Background of Modern Strategy. New York, London and Sydney: John Wiley & Sons, 1966. More gap-filling. Again it's a unique book -- there's nowhere else you can turn for an overview of intellectual reactions to the coming of the bomber in such a wide variety of countries (well, the major powers anyway), especially chapters 5 and 6 on the interwar period. The main problem, aside from it being published in 1966 (there was a 1986 reprint with a new introduction, but unfortunately that didn't discuss the more recent secondary literature) is hinted at in the title: it's a contribution to Cold War IR theory, not history.

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