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The American WMD programs remain cloaked in secrecy, yet a substantial number of revealing documents have been quietly declassified since the late 1970s. Put together, they tell the story of how America secretly built up the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The documents explain the role these weapons played in a series of world crises, how they shaped U.S. and NATO defense and foreign policy during the Cold War, and what incidents and nearly averted disasters happened. Moreover, they shed a light on the dreadful human and ecological legacy left by decades of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons manufacturing and testing in the U.S. and overseas.
This collection contains more than 2,300 formerly classified U.S. government documents, most of them classified Top Secret or higher. Covering the period from the end of World War II to the present day, it provides unique access to previously unpublished reports, memoranda, cables, intelligence briefs, classified articles, PowerPoint presentations, military manuals and directives, and other declassified documents. Following years of archival research and careful selection, they were brought together from the U.S. National Archives, ten U.S. presidential libraries, the NATO Archives in Brussels, the National Archives of the UK, the National Archives of Canada, and the National Archives of the Netherlands. In addition, a sizeable number of documents in this collection were obtained from the U.S. government and the Pentagon using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) requests.
This collection comes with several auxiliary aids, including a chronology and a historiographical essay with links to the documents themselves, providing context and allowing for easy navigation for both students and scholars.
Highlights:
• The papers in this collection detail how America’s stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons were developed, the staggering costs that were involved, the network of laboratories where the bombs and their components were designed and developed, new details about the dozens of secret factories spread across the U.S. where these lethal bombs and warheads were built, the sites where they were tested, and even newly released information about some of the storage depots where the weapons were deployed in the U.S. and overseas.
• This collection contains for the first time ever a comprehensive set of declassified documents which quantify the size and destructive power of the American nuclear, chemical and biological weapons stockpile throughout the Cold War era, including new details about the many different types of weapons in these arsenals, such as nuclear landmines (Atomic Demolition Munitions) and even a nuclear-capable recoilless rifle system.
• This collection contains hundreds of pages of declassified Defense Department and State Department documents concerning the secret negotiations between the U.S. government and over fifteen foreign governments concerning the deployment of nuclear and chemical weapons to their countries (complete biological weapons were never deployed overseas), as well as the even more difficult task later in the Cold War of trying to get permission to remove these weapons after they had outlived their usefulness. In some instances, the U.S. government deliberately did not inform the host nations that they had deployed nuclear and chemical weapons to their countries, as in the case of Japan, which was shocked to learn in 1969 that the U.S. was storing large numbers of nuclear and chemical weapons on the island of Okinawa without their knowledge or consent.
• Also included are over a hundred declassified documents regarding U.S. nuclear war plans, detailing how the American nuclear, chemical and biological weapons were to be used in wartime, including lists of their targets inside the USSR and the People’s Republic of China; newly declassified documents containing the details of all known nuclear, chemical and biological weapons accidents, some of which produced fatal results; and incidents involving attempts by foreign governments (Greece, Turkey and South Korea) to pressure the U.S. government by threatening to seize American nuclear weapons stored on their soil. Finally, there are recently released files concerning an attempt by a terrorist group to penetrate a U.S. nuclear weapons storage site in West Germany.
Number of documents: 2,374
Number of pages: ca. 21,212
Auxiliary aids:
• Introductory essay
• Glossary of acronyms
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• MARC21 catalog records
Sourcing archives:
• U.S. National Archives, Legislative Archives Branch, Washington, D.C.
• U.S. National Archives. Military Records Branch, College Park, Maryland
• U.S. National Archives, Civilian Records Branch, College Park, Maryland
• North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Archives, Brussels, Belgium
• National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Canada
• National Archives of the Netherlands, The Hague, The Netherlands
• National Archives of the UK, Kew, Great Britain
• Washington National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland
• Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri
• Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas
• John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts
• Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas
• Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California
• Gerald R. Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan
• Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, Georgia
• Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California
• George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, Houston, Texas
• William J. Clinton Presidential Library, Little Rock, Arkansas
• Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.
• DOD FOIA Reading Room, The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.
• U.S. Army Center for Military History, Washington, D.C.
• Naval Historical Center Operational Archives, Washington, D.C.
• U.S. Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell AFB, Alabama
• Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information, Washington, D.C.
• Douglas MacArthur Library, Norfolk, Virginia (Douglas MacArthur Papers)
• George C. Marshall Library, Lexington, Virginia (George C. Marshall Papers)
• Mudd Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ (George W. Ball Papers)
• National Security Archive, Washington, D.C. (Chuck Hansen Collection)
• Maryland Historical Trust, Annapolis, Maryland
See also the companion collections Cold War Intelligence, U.S. Intelligence on Asia, 1945-1991, U.S. Intelligence on Europe, 1945-1995, and U.S. Intelligence on the Middle East, 1945-2009.
The SHAFR Guide Online: An Annotated Bibliography of U.S. Foreign Relations since 1600 is a near-comprehensive, 2.1 million-word online annotated bibliography of historical work covering the entire span of U.S. foreign relations. It aims to jump-start the research of both students from high school to graduate school as well as the most advanced scholars. The SHAFR Guide Online, created by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) and helmed by General Editor Alan McPherson, should be the first place to which researchers turn when establishing a bibliography, whether it be about US-Latin American relations in the 19th century, World War II, or US-China/East Asia relations since the Vietnam War.
The SHAFR Guide Online’s thirty chapters cover all eras in U.S. history from colonial days through the Barack Obama presidency as well as all geographical areas of the world. A specialist of the topic has expertly organized and annotated each chapter’s entries. The latest edition also includes four new thematic chapters—on economic issues; non-governmental actors; domestic issues, the Congress, and public opinion; and race, gender, and culture. Entries include every type of historical source, from collections of government documents to biographies, monographs, book chapters, journal articles, web sites, and much more.
The SHAFR Guide itself has a long, illustrious history. Since 1983, SHAFR has published several previous editions, under different names, edited by Richard Dean Burns, Robert Beisner, and Thomas Zeiler. Henceforth, The SHAFR Guide will be primarily an online tool. The addition of keywords for each entry is meant to make searches as effortless as possible. It is destined to become the preeminent bibliography in the field and an indispensable research tool for historians of U.S. foreign relations—amateurs and professionals alike.
The following collections are available:
• Cold War Intelligence
• U.S. Intelligence on the Middle East, 1945-2009
• U.S. Intelligence on Europe, 1945-1995
• U.S. Intelligence on Asia, 1945-1991
• Weapons of Mass Destruction
Number of documents: 4,285
Number of pages: ca. 23,500
Auxiliary aids:
- Introductory essay
- Glossary of acronyms
- Chronology
- Bibliography
- MARC21 catalog records
Sourcing archives:
- National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Maryland
- CIA-CREST database
- Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri
- Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas
- John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts
- Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas
- Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California
- Gerald R. Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan
- Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, Georgia
- Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California
- Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.
- U.S. Army Center for Military History, Washington, D.C.
- U.S. Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell AFB, Alabama
- Naval Historical Center Operational Archives, Washington, D.C.
- Douglas MacArthur Library, Norfolk, Virginia
- National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, UK
- National Archives of Australia, Canberra, Australia
- Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas
- Archives of the National Defense University, Washington, D.C.
- Archives of the Army War College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania
See also the companion collections: Cold War Intelligence, U.S. Intelligence on the Middle East, 1945-2009, U.S. Intelligence on Europe, 1945-1995, and Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Scope:
U.S. Intelligence operations in Western Europe
U.S. Intelligence operations in Eastern Europe
U.S. Intelligence gathering on Western European communist parties
Economic intelligence gathering
Monitoring European anti-nuclear groups in the 1980s
Intelligence gathering on terrorist groups
Analyses of European socio-economic developments
Number of documents: 4,023
Number of pages: ca. 21,000
Auxiliary aids:
- Introductory essay
- Glossary of acronyms
- Chronology
- Bibliography
- MARC21 catalog records
Sourcing archives:
- National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Maryland
- CIA-CREST database
- Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri
- Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas
- George H.W. Bush Library, Houston, Texas
- John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts
- Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas
- Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California
- Gerald R. Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan
- Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, Georgia
- Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California
- Hoover Institution Archives, Palo Alto, California
- Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.
- George C. Marshall Research Library, Lexington, Virginia
- General Douglas MacArthur Memorial Library, Norfolk, Virginia
- National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, England
See also the companion collections: Cold War Intelligence, U.S. Intelligence on Asia, 1945-1991, U.S. Intelligence on the Middle East, 1945-2009, and Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Topics covered
U.S. Recognition of Israel and the 1948 Middle East War
Overthrowing Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran (1953)
1956 Middle East War
1967 Middle East War
Israel and the Atomic Bomb
Muammar Qadhafi’s 1969 Coup in Libya
1973 Middle East War
1973-1974 OPEC Oil Embargo
The Fall of the Shah of Iran and the Rise of Ayatollah Khomeini (1978-1979)
Iran-Iraq War (September 1980- August 1988)
Lebanon (1982-1984)
The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait (1990)
The Iraqi WMD Intelligence Assessments (2002-2003)
The Abortive Syrian Nuclear Program (2006-2007)
The Iranian Nuclear Program (1970s-present)
The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism
The U.S.-Israeli Intelligence Relationship
Spying on Israel
Number of documents: 2,740
Number of pages: 19,500
Auxiliary aids:
- Introductory essay
- Glossary of acronyms
- Glossary of organizations
- Glossary of personalities
- Chronology
- Bibliography
Sourcing archives:
- National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Maryland
- CIA-CREST database
- Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri
- Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas
- John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts
- Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas
- Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California
- Gerald R. Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan
- Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta, Georgia
- Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California
- Hoover Institution Archives, Palo Alto, California
- Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.
- George C. Marshall Research Library, Lexington, Virginia
- General Douglas MacArthur Memorial Library, Norfolk, Virginia
- National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, England
See also the companion collections: Cold War Intelligence, U.S. Intelligence on Asia, 1945-1991, U.S. Intelligence on the Middle East, 1945-2009, and Weapons of Mass Destruction.