Journal of Peace Research

The Direct Communications Link (DCL) between Moscow and Washington, established in 1963 and commonly known as the `hot-line', is supposed to provide a continuous communications link between US and Soviet National Command Authorities in both crises and war. This article describes the principal rationales for the DCL (crisis management, escalation control and war termination) and the facilities and systems which presently constitute the link. It argues that the present system has significant deficiencies in terms of survivability and endurance which make it unable to satisfy the requirements for escalation control and war termination, and it outlines possible measures for rectifying these deficiencies. These include a dedicated geostationary satellite communications system, with two satellites, both fixed and mobile satellite ground control stations, and optical fibre cable links for the ground connections, and with an adaptive high frequency (HF) radio circuit as a backup. The recent political developments in the Soviet Union and in the US-Soviet strategic relationship have dramatically reduced the likelihood of strategic confrontation. However, this is not a reason for inaction. Both the US and the Soviet Union intend to retain thousands of nuclear weapons, at least in the foreseeable future, and crises and confrontations between them cannot be ruled out altogether. Rather, these changed political circumstances provide an opportunity for cooperative efforts to dramatically improve the communications links between Moscow and Washington.

This research considers the enduring, cross-cultural belief that women oppose war more than men do and seeks to disentangle it from competing explanations of anti-war attitudes. Focusing on correlates of pessimism and optimism about the imminence and survivability of nuclear war, support is found for hypotheses concerning psychic numbing, attenuated future plans, and political orientations, but not for hypotheses concerning hedonism and various demographic and background characteristics. The strongest finding is that women are significantly and substantially more pessimistic in their nuclear war attitudes than men, and this finding cannot be `explained away' statistically by the host of other variables considered in the analysis. Explanations of sex differences which refer to innate or socialized characteristics of women and men cannot be ruled out because data for direct tests are unavailable. But such explanations rely on women's unique childbearing capacity, and our best indicator of it - childbearing plans - is associated with nuclear war attitudes similarly for men as for women. A structural explanation of sex differences is offered; its advantages include greater promise for social change and parallels to other anti-war phenomena. An extensive literature review is included. Data come from sample surveys of university students in 1985 and 1987.

Long-term, economic incentive programs are a more pervasive feature of international relations than is generally appreciated. This article examines a recent incentive program - US technology transfer to the People's Republic of China - to determine its role in fostering bilateral cooperation (policy adjustment by one state to facilitate the goals of another) and in contributing to international peace and stability. The initial findings suggest that economic incentives can be a qualified success in achieving cooperation between the sender and target state largely through conditioning the environment in a manner that improves the possibility of goal attainment for both parties. In the broader international context, economic incentives are neither per se stabilizing nor destabilizing. As with any exercise of power, economic incentives or rewards carry the possibility of improving chances for peace or the possibility of destabilizing international relations, depending upon the situation in which they are introduced and the manner in which they are executed.

The Western export control organization COCOM is often viewed as an example of `economic sanctions'. This is misleading, as the COCOM embargo was never intended to coerce Soviet leaders into changing their conduct, but to weaken the Soviet Union's military capabilities. COCOM is better understood as `economic warfare'. Analysts differ as to whether to base their definition of economic warfare on means employed or on ends sought after; the solution preferred here is to view economic warfare as a continuum of policies aiming to weaken the economic base of the adversary's power. `Strategic embargo', defined as restrictions on the export of strategic goods, is viewed as a means either to conduct economic warfare or to control the export of predominantly military items. Analysts building on the theory of comparative advantages and fungibility of resources define strategic goods as items which are relatively inefficient to produce domestically and needed for a given strategy. By importing such items, resources can be freed for more effective production. Not all inefficiently produced items are strategic: they should also contribute, directly or indirectly, to the adversary's military potential. Attempts to control strategic exports through the concept of contraband were built on this observation. In the world wars these efforts ended in the embargo of almost all goods, however, as very few commodities are irrelevant to war potential. Western Cold War perceptions of Soviet intentions have had it that the Kremlin has been bent on aggressive expansion. The logical policy to follow such an analysis would be a severance of trade relations with Eastern Europe. West European policy-makers refrained from this course, probably out of fear of political and economic repercussions. The logical policy to follow the current re-evaluation of Soviet intentions after the end of the Cold War would be to embargo only arms and items solely or predominantly useful for military purposes, but not to abolish COCOM as long as NATO exists.

A relationship between US military aid and the human rights practices of potential recipient countries is mandated by law. Yet the preponderance of the results obtained in past quantitative studies seems to indicate that no such relationship exists in reality. This study focuses on the question of whether governments that abuse human rights are disqualified completely from US military aid programs. When some weaknesses of previous studies are rectified, human rights abuse is then found to have affected the allocation of military aid in two distinct samples of countries: Western hemisphere countries; and a random sample of the world's nations, micro-states excluded. Human rights abuse affected US military aid allocation during both the Carter and Reagan presidencies. The appearance of a relationship during the Reagan presidency indicates the effect endured even under an administration thought generally to have de-emphasized human rights in its foreign-policy decisions.

How is the position of weak powers today affected by detente and emerging US-Soviet cooperation? More generally, what happens to the power position and the security strategies of the weak as tension fluctuates between the strong? What happens, in particular, to their ability and willingness to mediate between the strong and hence contribute to detente? A theoretical construct, a `constellation theory', is established in order to answer these questions. `Constellation' refers to the weak nation's basic set of relationships to the strong, be it a symmetric constellation, an alliance constellation or some other type. The expectations derived from the theory are confronted with observations of Swedish and Finnish strategies during the rising and high level of superpower tension in the first half of the 1980s. Only one minor deviation between expectations and observations is found, and this can be accounted for fairly well. The two neighbouring countries, with relatively similar domestic political systems (and similar archipelagos!) but involved in different constellations, are found to be affected in inverse ways by rising and high tension: Swedish policy is activated whereas Finnish policy is de-activated. This corroborates the theoretically justified belief in the explanatory power of the notion of `constellations'. In the concluding section, some speculations on weak powers in the alliance constellation are made. The results of this article should be seen as a criticism of the small state research which theorizes on `small states' (`weak powers') in general, without explicitly considering the constellations in which they are involved.

Two books by Birgit Brock-Utne, Educating for Peace and Feminist Perspectives on Peace and Peace Education, convey the picture of their author, an internationally known activist in women's work for peace. Peace is defined not only as absence of violence, but as equality of rights as well. The author provides plenty of facts about the disadvantageous living conditions and position of women, and classifies this information into categories of violence. A feminist perspective on peace education means concentrating on women's possibilities to influence the socialization process of (their) children. The author's personal contribution consists of analysing a wealt of research results from the viewpoint of gender-specific socialization. Starting from the view that boys are educated for war and girls for peace, the author develops a view of socialization that would promote peace. The discussion of socialization concentrates on its influence on personality traits of youngsters, but the growth process itself is not really analysed. Seen from the author's feminist perspective, the formal school system is unfit for peace education, functioning to maintain the existing (male) power structure of society. Conceptual extrapolation from individual traits to the relationships between nations and national states is characteristic of many views presented by the author. In the final pages of the second monograph, the author states that in order to promote peace, changes should be made simultaneously at the micro-, meso-and macrolevels of society. If this is taken seriously, then the role of the formal school system cannot be overlooked.