102,038 research outputs found
The Anglo-American 'special relationship' and the Middle East, 1945-1973
It is widely recognised that the Anglo-American âspecial relationshipâ fluctuated following the Second World War. A âPersistent rivalryâ was especially evident in policy towards the Middle East and its oil. Immediately after the war, the American attitude to Palestine seemed to complicate British policy. Events in Iran also reflected the clash between the British imperative to protect its national and imperial interests in the region on the one hand, and the American preoccupation with the Cold War and containment on the other. The subsequent differences over Egypt/ Nasser are a matter of public record as are the problems which arose over the British withdrawal from âEast of Suezâ. Perhaps the very closeness of the relationship between the UK and the US served to heighten expectations
Priests and politicians: Archbishop Michael Gonzi, Dom Mintoff, and the end of empire in Malta
The political contest in Malta at the end of empire involved not merely the British colonial authorities and emerging nationalists, but also the powerful Catholic Church. Under Archbishop Gonziâs leadership, the Church took an overtly political stance over the leading issues of the day including integration with the United Kingdom, the declaration of an emergency in 1958, and Maltaâs progress towards independence. Invariably, Gonzi and the Church found themselves at loggerheads with the Dom Mintoff and his Malta Labour Party. Despite his uncompromising image, Gonzi in fact demonstrated a flexible turn of mind, not least on the central issue of Maltese independence. Rather than seeking to stand in the way of Maltaâs move towards constitutional separation from Britain, the Archbishop set about co-operating with the Nationalist Party of Giorgio Borg Olivier in the interests of securing the position of the Church within an independent Malta. For their part, the British came to accept by the early 1960s the desirability of Maltese self-determination and did not try to use the Church to impede progress towards independence. In the short-term, Gonzi succeeded in protecting the Church during the period of decolonization, but in the longer-term the papacyâs softening of its line on socialism, coupled with the return to power of Mintoff in 1971, saw a sharp decline in the fortunes of the Church and Archbishop Gonzi
Efficient Graph State Construction Under the Barrett and Kok Scheme
Recently Barrett and Kok (BK) proposed an elegant method for entangling
separated matter qubits. They outlined a strategy for using their entangling
operation (EO) to build graph states, the resource for one-way quantum
computing. However by viewing their EO as a graph fusion event, one perceives
that each successful event introduces an ideal redundant graph edge, which
growth strategies should exploit. For example, if each EO succeeds with
probability p=0.4 then a highly connected graph can be formed with an overhead
of only about ten EO attempts per graph edge. The BK scheme then becomes
competitive with the more elaborate entanglement procedures designed to permit
p to approach unity.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures. Small refinement
Centurions and Chieftains : tank sales and British policy towards Israel in the aftermath of the Six Day War
Britain's attempt to distance itself from Israel as London sought to conciliate the Arab world in the aftermath of the Six-Day War has entered the historiography of Anglo-Israeli relations. A neglected aspect of the development of British policy towards Israel has been the intense debates among British decision-makers regarding the supply of tanks to Israel following the 1967 conflict. British reluctance to export the powerful Chieftain tank to Israel stemmed not only from an unwillingness to fuel an arms race in the Middle East, but also from a determination to protect ongoing and extensive British economic interests in the Arab world, especially oil supplies. In keeping with efforts to dissociate itself from Israel, Britain also sought to downplay, and even conceal from the Arab world, ongoing sales of the less sophisticated Centurion tank to Israel. In many ways, British policy towards Israel culminated in the decision during the 1973 Yom Kippur War to maintain an arms embargo to the region which, while not extending to all Arab countries, hit Israel especially hard as it desperately sought ammunition and spares for its Centurion tanks
Britainâs decision to withdraw from the Persian Gulf: a pattern not a puzzle
The reasons for the British decision to withdraw from the Gulf are highly contentious. While some scholars have focused on short-term considerations, especially the devaluation of sterling towards the end of 1967, in the British determination to quit the Gulf, others have concentrated on longer-term trends in British policy-making for the region. This article sides with the latter. Britain's Gulf role came under increasing scrutiny following the 1956 Suez crisis as part of an ongoing debate about the costs and benefits of Britain's Gulf presence. In this sense, British withdrawal fitted into a wider pattern of British decolonisation. By the 1960s, the Treasury, in particular, strongly questioned the necessity and cost-effectiveness of the maintenance of empire in the Gulf to safeguard British economic interests there. Recent interpretations which seek to disaggregate the British decision to leave Southeast Asia from the decision to depart from the Gulf are also questionable. By mid-1967, it had already been determined that Britain would leave both regions by the mid-1970s, the only difference being that this decision was formally announced with respect to Southeast Asia, but not with regard to the Gulf. The devaluation of sterling in November 1967, therefore, merely hastened and facilitated decisions which had already been taken. Despite the end of formal empire in the Gulf, Britain did seek, not always successfully, to preserve its interests into the 1970s and beyond
Hamilton's turns as visual tool-kit for designing of single-qubit unitary gates
Unitary evolutions of a qubit are traditionally represented geometrically as
rotations of the Bloch sphere, but the composition of such evolutions is
handled algebraically through matrix multiplication [of SU(2) or SO(3)
matrices]. Hamilton's construct, called turns, provides for handling the latter
pictorially through the as addition of directed great circle arcs on the unit
sphere S, resulting in a non-Abelian version of the
parallelogram law of vector addition of the Euclidean translation group. This
construct is developed into a visual tool-kit for handling the design of
single-qubit unitary gates. As an application, it is shown, in the concrete
case wherein the qubit is realized as polarization states of light, that all
unitary gates can be realized conveniently through a universal gadget
consisting of just two quarter-wave plates (QWP) and one half-wave plate (HWP).
The analysis and results easily transcribe to other realizations of the qubit:
The case of NMR is obtained by simply substituting and pulses
respectively for QWPs and HWPs, the phases of the pulses playing the role of
the orientation of fast axes of these plates.Comment: 16 Pages, 14 Figures, Published versio
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