Beginnings of the Cold War Arms Race: The Truman Administration and the U.S. Arms Build-Up

Beginnings of the Cold War Arms Race: The Truman Administration and the U.S. Arms Build-Up. By Raymond P. Ojserkis. (Westport: Praeger, 2003. x, 237 pp. $65.00, ISBN 0275-98016-2.)

The momentous Cold War arms race did not simply coincide with deteriorating Soviet-American relations from 1945 to 1950. In Raymond J. Ojserkis's judgment, American and Western conventional military power weakened considerably during those years, a process not decisively reversed until the Korean War. American defense spending would then soar in the early 1950s, not to moderate significantly until the 1970s.

The details of America's extended postwar demobilization are fully documented by Ojserkis, as budget increases sought by the military were blocked by a fiscally conservative Congress, an equally cautious president, Harry S. Truman, and his dutifully parsimonious secretary of defense, Louis Johnson. These leaders generally assumed that the war-weary Soviets...