I'm currently reading Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force by Robert M. Farley. While I was studying for my master's degree, I read several items about nuclear strategy and the history of nuclear deterrence. Notable among these were The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy by Lawrence Freedman, World Politics and the Evolution of War by John J. Weltman, The Anatomy of Deterrence by Bernard Brodie, and The Delicate Balance of Terror by Albert Wohlstetter. On Friday, War on the Rocks published a couple of great items on the topic. One was an article in their (W)archives series entitled Aerial Bombardment and Hitting the Broad Side of a Barn, which discussed the inaccuracy of Second World War bombing campaigns. The second was their weekly Weekend Reading list, which included a link to the new Bomb Sight website, which provides a detailed, interactive map of the British government's postwar bomb census.
At the moment, and increasingly since I began doing those readings for my degree, one of my fascinations is and has been the history of how the Royal Air Force and the United States Air Force turned some very controversial theory about air power into a case for independence from the other services. This was obviously bolstered, somewhat understandably, by the proliferation of atomic weapons after 1945. Farley's book serves as a sort of long overdue sanity check with respect to that independence. One of my longer-standing interests is geography, and particularly conflict geography. (At this point, I'd love to link to an old website that was tracking the Libyan Civil War in 2011, but I can't find it; that said, I found a fascinating New York Times graphic that partially scratches that particular itch).
Ancillary to the nuclear topic is the discovery of the hulk of the USS Independence, which was recently discovered in the waters near San Francisco. The article and the pictures are worth having a look at.
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