International Security
and Peace
WWII
Prof. Jaechun Kim
WWII in context
About 60 million people were dead
Truly world wide war
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National Policies and Ideas
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Germany
• practiced creative history during Weimar republic!
• They started the WWI… we lost the war because of
Jews and Socialists… war outcome was not properly
evaluated..
• Versailles treaty were too harsh  Lebensraum; We
need a bigger empire!
• Rise of Hitler (44% of popular votes); G need a bigger
empire!
Japan
• Militarism appears in Japan.. Dominate foreign policies
and national ideas.. Japan is insecure… need an
empire…
• A sugar-coated self image – empire is good for Asians!
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Italy
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Britain and France
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weakened by WWI… Britain became isolationist and appeased
Germany…
Russia
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Rise of Mussolini
Bolshevik Revolution (1917) & Aftermath
Petersburg  Moscow
Indifferent to Nazis Germany… even helped them to annex
territories in E. Europe
How the Storm Gathered
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Peace seemed to be prevailing…
Non-aggression pact at Locarno in 1925
Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact in 1928
World-wide economic depression – 1929
As the depression spreads, the treaty began break down…
Hitler comes into power in 1933.. Announced that he’d reject all the
military limitations of V treaty…
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Hitler’s recoveries & conquests
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Remilitarizing the Rhineland (industrial heartland of G)
1936  opening door for the war…
Austria 1938 – assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss
Czech 1938-39 - demanded Sudentenland, and then
more  Munich conference  “Munich Pact”
The rest of Czech *Emil Hacha..
Poland next – 1939 (Sept. 1) w/o declaring war…
Far East
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Japan invaded Taiwan (1895), Korea(1905),
Manchuria, and China…
The US wanted neutrality until late 1930s…
Pearl Harbor (Dec. 7th 1941)
The US declared war on Dec 8th. G and Italy declared
war on the US…
Origins (Causes) of WWII
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Hitler blaming view – racial Darwinism and
Lebensraum…
cf. AJP Taylor, Origins of the Second World War - Hitler
didn’t have time table for conquest… for general war…
3rd level explanation to the outbreak of WWII
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Problems in multi-polar system
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K. Waltz and BOP theory
Chain-ganging
Buck-passing
Why is bipolar system stable compared to multi-polar
system?
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Neither chain ganging nor buck passing…
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Chain ganging and buck passing and advantage of
offense and defense
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Cult of defensive and WWII
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Before WWII states believed that defense had the
advantage… historical learning .. wrong analogy!!!
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Military-fueled cult of offensive vs. civilian-based cult of
defensive
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WWI – result of spiral process in which alliance
dynamics magnified the local disputes, turning them into
global issue

WWII – deterrence failure in which buck-passing
diplomacy by the status quo powers encouraged
expansionist powers to risk aggression
German strategies for WWI and WWII compared
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Strategy for Decisive Victory (“S” Plan)
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Strategy of Piecemeal Expansion
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Strategy of limited liability and buck passing of Russia,
France, and Britain..
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Soviet Union : Stalin – “Soviet Union would not willing to
pull others’ chestnuts out of the fire”; Stalin to
Khrushcheve after France collapsed – “Couldn’t they
(French) put up any resistance at all?”
France : Let’s pass the cost to Brits!
Britain : strategy of limited liability; Chamberlain thought
that French defenses were strong enough to deter Hitler..
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What do you think of this line of analysis?
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Churchill: “There was never a war in all history easier to
prevent by timely action than the one which has just
desolated such great areas of the globe.” Hitler’s gamble
was based on the lack of will on the part of Allies…
2nd level explanation: regime type and aggressiveness?
 Nature of the societies explain belligerence and atrocities

Intentional Killing of Civilians during the
WWII
 During
WWI - about 10 million people have
died, but only 5 percent of deaths were
civilians.
 During
WWII - about 60 million people have
killed, but 70 percent of those deaths were
civilians.
 25
percent by Holocaust; the rest by
intentional targeting of civilians during
warfare
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Mass killing of innocent people was not unique to
WWII
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But the WWII was the worst… Why?
 Technological factors
 Psychological factors
 Evacuation to the east
 deportation to death camps
 Special action
 killing
 Dehousing
 destruction of housing and occupants of villages
 Collateral damage  killing of civilians
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How did the Allies begin strategic bombing?
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Japan and Germany began indiscriminate killing of
civilians first…
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Japan
• Rape of Nanking (1937) – killed 350,000 civilians.
raped 80,000 women Iris Chang, The Rape of
Nanking…
• Maruta - experiments on humans for chemical and
biological warfare
• Rape of Manila – 700,000 civilians were killed
• Comfort women (Sex slaves)
• killed 7-11 million people
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Germany – Holocaust
• 6 million Jews killed…
Strategic Bombing by Allies
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Britain
 Initial restraint – deliberately avoided civilian targets
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Erosion of restraint as Churchill comes in
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The objective - targeting the moral forces of the
German people
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Churchill’s chief advisor told Churchill: “Investigation
seems to show that having one’s house demolished
is most damaging to morale. People seem to mind it
more than having their friends or even relatives killed.
Now success in the war became measured by the
number of acres of civilian housing and urban area
destroyed.”
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Operation Gomorrah (Firebombing of Hamburg in 1944)
“The whole of Hamburg was on fire from one end to the other.
Temperatures in the city on the ground reached 1400
degrees. Firestorm created a tornado of fire. Babies were
torn from mothers’ arms by the high winds and sucked into
the conflagration. In the basement air-raid shelter, we found
nothing but bones suspended in congealed fat. Women and
children were so charred as to be unrecognizable. Small
children lay like fried eels on the pavement.” - 50,000 died
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Bombing of Dresden (February 1945) -150,000 killed
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Bombing of Berlin (February 1945) - 27,000 killed
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Revulsion after the war
•
Churchill didn’t authorize medals for the bomb crews..
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US
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Initial restraint to Germany; daylight precision bombing
of military and industrial targets…
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Toward the end of war, they shifted to firebombing of
civilians
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Kill morale of Germany and teach them a lesson… - FDR: “We’ve got to be tough on Germany, and I
mean the German people not just the Nazis. We either
have to castrate the German people or you have got to
treat them in such a manner so they can’t just go on
reproducing people who want to continue the way they
have in the past.”
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By spring of 1945, 50 largest cities in Germany had all
been destroyed!
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Initial policy towards Japan was different
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General Marshall (before Pearl Harbor):
“We will fight mercilessly. Flying fortresses will be
dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan
on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing
civilians. It will be all-out.”
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Air commander Hansel was replaced by Curtis LeMay..
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The Big Test : Tokyo, March 9-10 (1945)
• mostly targeting residential areas
• “…so many people burned to death that the smell of
burning flesh nauseated the crews flying above…
Ground temperature reached 1800 degree F.
Estimate is that about 130,000 people got killed in 6
hours”
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Next, the rest of Japan is targeted ..
•
85 % of Yokohama; 55 % of Osaka
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Official Reaction : “the phenomenal success of our
new tactics had precipitously salvaged the morale
and fighting spirit of our crews by providing a
degree of battle success proportionate to the effort
expended…”
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Gen. Thomas Powell : “the greatest single disaster
incurred by any enemy in military history, there
were more casualties than in any other single
military action in the history of the world…”
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Similarities and differences between strategic
bombing and the holocaust?
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calculated indiscriminate slaughter of masses of
defenseless humans
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Both were national security policies
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Killers were normal people…
Then, what were the differences?
Conceptual Framework : Factors which
facilitate mass killing of civilians
 Psychological
factors - dehumanization of
victims;
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In the US, war against Japanese was a war about
race.
• One newspaper editorial: “Japanese
Americans, being of a different race, posed a
serious threat that would continue until they
are wiped off the face of the map.”
•
Admiral Halsey, Commander of the US South
Pacific Force: “Fighting Japs is not like fighting
normal human beings. We are not dealing with
humans as we know them. We are dealing with
something primitive. Our troops have the right
view of the Japs. We regard them as vermin.”
•
Truman : “I think one man is as good as another
so long as he’s honest and decent and not a
nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the
Lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from
mud, then threw up what was left and it came
down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and
Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice, I guess. But I
am strongly of the opinion that Negroes ought to
live in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men
in Europe and America.”
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Bureaucratization (Compartmentalization) of killing:
division of labor and organizational loyalty  no guilty
feeling … bureaucracy breaks down complex tasks into
smaller simpler ones…
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Technological factors  Technical distancing
What’s the difference between strategic bombing and
dropping of nuclear bombs?
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Level of destruction is about the same (Hiroshima and
Nagasaki could have been destroyed by 2.1 kilotons of
conventional bombs..)
“A” bomb - a different way of delivering the same results
Two differences: Time involved and radiation poisoning
The A bomb was nothing more than strategic bombing
made easy!
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Then what caused the Japanese to quit?
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Was it the A bomb?
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Japanese seemed to have surrendered because
of military vulnerability, not because of civilian
vulnerability…
Allies already reached culminating point of victory
before dropping of A bombs…
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Then why did the US drop the A bombs?
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Can the intentional killing of civilians be justified in
terms of means to achieve political goals –
unconditional surrender of enemies?
COLD WAR
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What was the Cold War?
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Big Time Competition
 BAD
 GOOD?
• Recovery of Europe and Japan
• NATO and other cooperative international
institutions
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Ideological competition - all encompassing ideological
gloss put on all aspects of the competitions
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Zero sum nature – Security Dilemma
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Life of the Cold War
 Nuclear arms race was perhaps the most stable
area of cold war competition
 Standoff in Europe was almost as stable and
peaceful as the nuclear arms race
 Competition in the Third World, most unstable
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Origins of the Cold War: Who (what) caused the
Cold War?
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Prevailing western view: Soviet blaming view (Gaddis)
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Revisionist view
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Ideological explanation
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Spiral model (International Systemic Explanation –
Security Dilemma)
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Psychological model (1st level of analysis)
 Misperceptions
 Wrong (?) historical analogy
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State level explanation – too deterministic??
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Development of US strategic thinking (late 1940s
and early 1950s)
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Hungary (1947)
Czech coup (1948)
Berlin Blockade in 1948
Blockade led the NSC to write NSC-9
Preventive War Thinking in the US in the late
1940s and the early 1950s !
e.g. Bertrand Russell, Bernard Brodie, George
Kennan
Nuclear monopoly
The loss of nuclear monopoly and NSC 68
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NSC 68
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Paul Nitze, George Kennan’s successor as head of
the State Dept’s Policy Planning Staff ; Dean Acheson
not a defensive-minded, status quo-oriented document
They could overrun WU; move on the oil bearing
areas of ME; consolidate communist gains in Far East;
launch air attack on British Isles; attack selected target
with nuclear weapons including Canada and the US
No distinction between vital and peripheral interests
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Domino Theory…
But US Congress was still in isolationist mode
But Korean War changes everything
 US defense spending rose from 30% of budget to
60%, from 5% of GDP to 18%.
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What ended the Cold War?
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What ended the Cold War?
Power politics vs. Liberalism view
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Reagan victory school
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The role of Gorvy …