The study of surprise attacks

During the years following the Second World War, intensive research was undertaken on the subject of response to threat. Confronted with the baffling yet recurrent inability of nations to respond adequately to warnings of an impending attack, many scholars concentrated on such events as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the outbreak of the Korean War, and produced a voluminous empirical literature, as well as a considerably meagre body of theoretically oriented works. Thus alongside the plethora of works that sought explanations solely in terms of certain specific conditions operating at the time of the event analyzed, a few other inquiries attempted to integrate the case under scrutiny into a broader theoretical context in order to better elucidate the patterns by which nations cope with situations of crisis and threat.