Description
A MILITARY PROJECTION
FOUNDED ON TODAY’S FACTS
Edited by Shelford Bidwell
Because the victors of 1918 failed to
take action against a fast-rearming
Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill
called World War 2 “the unnecessary
war.” But according to Lenin’s prophesy
of more than 55 years ago, World War
3 may well qualify for the title of “the
inevitable war”:
As long as capitalism and Social-
ism remain, we cannot live in
peace. In the end one or other will
triumph-a funeral requiem will
be sung either over the Soviet Re-
public or over world capitalism.
Memories of Hiroshima, plus the
widespread acquisition of nuclear
weapons by the leading world powers,
have made the idea of another global
war as unthinkable as it is terrifying.
Elaborate steps have been taken by the
superpowers to avoid the accidental
outbreak of a nuclear holocaust. Yet at
the same time the Soviet bloc has built
up a massive superiority in conven-
tional weapons, while repeated cuts in
Western defense spending are only in-
creasing NATO’s reliance on the nu-
clear deterrent.
These are the ominous facts be-
hind this unique study of the shadow
under which the world has lived since
1945. Shelford Bidwell and his team of
experts in diplomatic, strategic and
military studies have constructed a
balanced analysis of the international
military line-up on land, sea and in the
air. Part I of the book covers the mili-
tary balance and tensions oftoday. Part
11, extending the trends already in ex-
istence, looks into the future to im-
agine how World War 3 could well
break out, and what course it would ac-
tually take.
Each superpower knows how far it
can go in pressuring the other while
stopping short of intolerable provoca-
tion. But even so the ever-growing mil-
itary imbalance between East and
West could well be our last signpost on
the road to Armageddon.
In World War 2 SHELFORD BIDWELL
commanded a battery in North Africa,
landed in Italy at Salerno and was a
staff officer in an armored division in
Italy. In 1946 he was an instructor at
the Staff College. Later he became Chief
Instructor Tactical Development at the
Royal School of Artillery and, on pro-
motion, Commander, Royal Artillery in
the 2nd Division of the British Army of
the Rhine. In both of these appoint-
ments he was actively concerned with
the increasing problems of land tactics
in the nuclear age, which he later ana-
lyzed in his controversial book Modern
Warfare. After Germany he served in
the Far East during the war in Borneo.
This wide experience was valuable to
him when he turned to military history
and the problems of contemporary de-
fense. He was elected Fellow of the
Royal Historical Society in 1974 and
member of Council of the Royal United
Services Institute for Defence Studies
in 1978.
In very good to excellent preloved condition
Hardcover
208 pages