Risk management
Risk management is the identification and prioritization of risks followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize and control the probability or impact of unfortunate events or to maximize the realization of opportunities. Risks can come from various sources including uncertainty in financial markets, threats from project failures, legal liabilities, credit risk, natural causes and disasters, deliberate attack from an adversary, or events of uncertain or unpredictable root-cause. There are two types of events i.e. negative events can be classified as risks while positive events are classified as opportunities. Several risk management standards have been developed including the Project Management Institute, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, actuarial societies, ISO standards. Methods and goals vary according to whether the risk management method is in the context of project management, engineering, industrial processes, financial portfolios, actuarial assessments, or public health and safety.
Strategies to manage threats include avoiding the threat, reducing the negative effect or probability of the threat, transferring all or part of the threat to another party, retaining some or all of the potential or actual consequences of a particular threat, the opposites for opportunities. Certain aspects of many of the risk management standards have come under criticism for having no measurable improvement on risk. For example, one study found. A used vocabulary for risk management is defined by ISO Guide 73:2009, "Risk management. Vocabulary."In ideal risk management, a prioritization process is followed whereby the risks with the greatest loss and the greatest probability of occurring are handled first, risks with lower probability of occurrence and lower loss are handled in descending order. In practice the process of assessing overall risk can be difficult, balancing resources used to mitigate between risks with a high probability of occurrence but lower loss versus a risk with high loss but lower probability of occurrence can be mishandled.
Intangible risk management identifies a new type of a risk that has a 100% probability of occurring but is ignored by the organization due to a lack of identification ability. For example, when deficient knowledge is applied to a situation, a knowledge risk materializes. Relationship risk appears. Process-engagement risk may be an issue; these risks directly reduce the productivity of knowledge workers, decrease cost-effectiveness, service, reputation, brand value, earnings quality. Intangible risk management allows risk management to create immediate value from the identification and reduction of risks that reduce productivity. Risk management faces difficulties in allocating resources; this is the idea of opportunity cost. Resources spent on risk management could have been spent on more profitable activities. Again, ideal risk management minimizes spending and minimizes the negative effects of risks. According to the definition to the risk, the risk is the possibility that an event will occur and adversely affect the achievement of an objective.
Therefore, risk itself has the uncertainty. Risk management such as COSO ERM, can help; each company may have different internal control components. For example, the framework for ERM components includes Internal Environment, Objective Setting, Event Identification, Risk Assessment, Risk Response, Control Activities and Communication, Monitoring. For the most part, these methods consist of the following elements, more or less, in the following order. Identify, characterize threats assess the vulnerability of critical assets to specific threats determine the risk identify ways to reduce those risks prioritize risk reduction measures The International Organization for Standardization identifies the following principles of risk management:Risk management should: create value – resources expended to mitigate risk should be less than the consequence of inaction be an integral part of organizational processes be part of decision making process explicitly address uncertainty and assumptions be a systematic and structured process be based on the best available information be tailorable take human factors into account be transparent and inclusive be dynamic and responsive to change be capable of continual improvement and enhancement be continually or periodically re-assessed According to the standard ISO 31000 "Risk management – Principles and guidelines on implementation," the process of risk management consists of several steps as follows: This involves: the social scope of risk management the identity and objectives of stakeholders the basis upon which risks will be evaluated, constraints.
Defining a framework for the activity and an agenda for identification developing an analysis of risks involved in the process mitigation or solution of risks using available technological and organizational resources After establishing the context, the next step in the
Land use
Land use involves the management and modification of natural environment or wilderness into built environment such as settlements and semi-natural habitats such as arable fields and managed woods. It has been defined as "the total of arrangements and inputs that people undertake in a certain land cover type." Land use practices vary across the world. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization Water Development Division explains that "Land use concerns the products and/or benefits obtained from use of the land as well as the land management actions carried out by humans to produce those products and benefits." As of the early 1990s, about 13% of the Earth was considered arable land, with 26% in pasture, 32% forests and woodland, 1.5% urban areas. Land change modeling can be used to assess future shifts in land use; as Albert Guttenberg wrote many years ago, "'Land use' is a key term in the language of city planning." Political jurisdictions will undertake land-use planning and regulate the use of land in an attempt to avoid land-use conflicts.
Land use plans are implemented through land division and use ordinances and regulations, such as zoning regulations. Management consulting firms and non-governmental organizations will seek to influence these regulations before they are codified. In colonial America, few regulations existed to control the use of land, due to the endless amounts of it; as society shifted from rural to urban, public land regulation became important to city governments trying to control industry and housing within their boundaries. The first zoning ordinance was passed in New York City in 1916, and, by the 1930s, most states had adopted zoning laws. In the 1970s, concerns about the environment and historic preservation led to further regulation. Today, federal and local governments regulate growth and development through statutory law; the majority of controls on land, stem from the actions of private developers and individuals. Three typical situations bringing such private entities into the court system are: suits brought by one neighbor against another.
In these situations, judicial decisions and enforcement of private land-use arrangements can reinforce public regulation, achieve forms and levels of control that regulatory zoning cannot. Two major federal laws have been passed in the last half century that limit the use of land significantly; these are the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. The US Department of Agriculture has identified six major types of land use in the US. Acreage statistics for each type of land use in the contiguous 48 states in 2017 were as follows: Pasture/range: 654 M Forest: 538.6 M Cropland: 391.5 M Special use: 168.8 M Miscellaneous: 68.9 M Urban: 69.4 M Land use and land management practices have a major impact on natural resources including water, nutrients and animals. Land use information can be used to develop solutions for natural resource management issues such as salinity and water quality. For instance, water bodies in a region, deforested or having erosion will have different water quality than those in areas that are forested.
Forest gardening, a plant-based food production system, is believed to be the oldest form of land use in the world. The major effect of land use on land cover since 1750 has been deforestation of temperate regions. More recent significant effects of land use include urban sprawl, soil erosion, soil degradation and desertification. Land-use change, together with use of fossil fuels, are the major anthropogenic sources of carbon dioxide, a dominant greenhouse gas. According to a report by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, land degradation has been exacerbated where there has been an absence of any land use planning, or of its orderly execution, or the existence of financial or legal incentives that have led to the wrong land use decisions, or one-sided central planning leading to over-utilization of the land resources - for instance for immediate production at all costs; as a consequence the result has been misery for large segments of the local population and destruction of valuable ecosystems.
Such narrow approaches should be replaced by a technique for the planning and management of land resources, integrated and holistic and where land users are central. This will ensure the long-term quality of the land for human use, the prevention or resolution of social conflicts related to land use, the conservation of ecosystems of high biodiversity value; the urban growth boundary is one form of land-use regulation. For example, Oregon is required to have an urban growth boundary which contains at least 20,000 acres of vacant land. Additionally, Oregon restricts the development of farmland; the regulations are controversial, but an economic analysis concluded that farmland appreciated to the other land. Land-use and land-cover change defined at Encyclopedia of Earth Land Use Law News Alert Land Use Law by Prof. Daniel R. Mandelker The Relationship Between Land Use Decisions and the Impacts on Our Water and Natural Resources Land Use Accountability Project The Center for Public Integrity Schindler's Land Use Page Land Policy Institute at Michigan State University Land Use, Cornell University Law School
Condominium
A condominium shortened to condo, in the United States and in most Canadian provinces, is a type of living space similar to an apartment but independently sellable and therefore regarded as real estate. The condominium building structure is divided into several units that are each separately owned, surrounded by common areas that are jointly owned. Similar concepts in other English-speaking countries include strata title in Australia, New Zealand, the Canadian province of British Columbia. Residential condominiums are constructed as apartment buildings, but there has been an increase in the number of "detached condominiums", which look like single-family homes but in which the yards, building exteriors, streets are jointly owned and jointly maintained by a community association. Unlike apartments, which are leased by their tenants, condominium units are owned outright. Additionally, the owners of the individual units collectively own the common areas of the property, such as hallways, laundry rooms, etc. as well as common utilities and amenities, such as the HVAC system, so on.
Many shopping malls are industrial condominiums in which the individual retail and office spaces are owned by the businesses that occupy them while the common areas of the mall are collectively owned by all the business entities that own the individual spaces. The common areas and utilities are managed collectively by the owners through their association, such as a homeowner association. Scholars have traced the earliest known use of the condominium form of tenure to a document from first-century Babylon; the word condominium originated in Latin. Italy uses condominio, the modern Italian form of condominium. Both condo and condominium are used colloquially in the Canadian province of Quebec, where the official term is divided co-ownership. In France, the term is copropriété, the common areas of these properties are managed by a Syndicat de copropriété, or "co-property union". Latin American nations use the term propiedad horizontal meaning "horizontal property" but abstractly meaning that all owners of the property have equal interest.
The word condominio is used. However, in Spain, the legal term is comunidad de propietarios and the popular term is comunidad de vecinos. "Condominium" is a Latin word formed by adding the prefix con- to the word dominium. Its meaning is therefore "shared property". Condominia referred to territories over which two or more sovereign powers shared joint dominion; this technique was used to settle border disputes when multiple claimants could not agree on how to partition the disputed territory. For example, from 1818 to 1846, Oregon Country was a condominium over which both the United States and Great Britain shared joint sovereignty until the Oregon Treaty resolved the issue by splitting the territory along the 49th parallel and each country gaining sole sovereignty of one side; the difference between an "apartment" complex and condominium is purely legal. There is no way to differentiate a condominium from an apartment by looking at or visiting the building. What defines. A building developed as a condominium could be built at another location as an apartment building.
As a practical matter, builders tend to build condominiums to higher quality standards than apartment complexes because of the differences between the rental and sale markets. Technically, a condominium is a collection of individual home units and common areas along with the land upon which they sit. Individual home ownership within a condominium is construed as ownership of only the air space confining the boundaries of the home; the boundaries of that space are specified by a legal document known as a Declaration, filed on record with the local governing authority. These boundaries will include the wall surrounding a condo, allowing the homeowner to make some interior modifications without impacting the common area. Anything outside this boundary is held in an undivided ownership interest by a corporation established at the time of the condominium's creation; the corporation holds this property in trust on behalf of the homeowners as a group—it may not have ownership itself. Condominiums have conditions and restrictions, additional rules that govern how the individual unit owners are to share the space.
It is possible for a condominium to consist of single-family dwellings. There are "detached condominiums" where homeowners do not maintain the exteriors of the dwellings, etc. and "site condominiums" where the owner has more control and ownership over the exterior appearance. These structures are preferred by gated communities. A homeowners association, whose members are the unit owners, manages the condominium through a board of directors elected by the membership; this exists under various names depending on the jurisdiction, such as "unit title", "sectional title", "commonhold", "strata council", or "tenant-owner's association", "body corporate", "Owners Corporation", "condominium corporation" or "condominium association". Another variation of this concept is the "time share", although not all time shares are condominiums, not all time shares involve actual ownership of real property. C
Landform
A landform is a natural feature of the solid surface of the Earth or other planetary body. Landforms together make up a given terrain, their arrangement in the landscape is known as topography. Typical landforms include hills, plateaus and valleys, as well as shoreline features such as bays and seas, including submerged features such as mid-ocean ridges and the great ocean basins. Landforms are categorized by characteristic physical attributes such as elevation, orientation, rock exposure, soil type. Gross physical features or landforms include intuitive elements such as berms, hills, cliffs, rivers, peninsulas and numerous other structural and size-scaled elements including various kinds of inland and oceanic waterbodies and sub-surface features. Oceans and continents exemplify the highest-order landforms. Landform elements are parts of a high-order landforms that can be further identified and systematically given a cohesive definition such as hill-tops, saddles and backslopes; some generic landform elements including: pits, channels, passes and plains.
Terrain is the vertical dimension of land surface. Topography is the study of terrain, although the word is used as a synonym for relief itself; when relief is described underwater, the term bathymetry is used. In cartography, many different techniques are used to describe relief, including contour lines and TIN. Elementary landforms are the smallest homogeneous divisions of the land surface, at the given scale/resolution; these are areas with homogeneous morphometric properties, bounded by lines of discontinuity. A plateau or a hill can be observed at various scales ranging from few hundred meters to hundreds of kilometers. Hence, the spatial distribution of landforms is scale-dependent as is the case for soils and geological strata. A number of factors, ranging from plate tectonics to erosion and deposition, can generate and affect landforms. Biological factors can influence landforms— for example, note the role of vegetation in the development of dune systems and salt marshes, the work of corals and algae in the formation of coral reefs.
Landforms do not include man-made features, such as canals and many harbors. Many of the terms are not restricted to refer to features of the planet Earth, can be used to describe surface features of other planets and similar objects in the Universe. Examples are mountains, polar caps, valleys, which are found on all of the terrestrial planets; the scientific study of landforms is known as geomorphology. Landforms may be extracted from a digital elevation model using some automated techniques where the data has been gathered by modern satellites and stereoscopic aerial surveillance cameras; until compiling the data found in such data sets required time consuming and expensive techniques involving many man-hours. The most detailed DEMs available are measured directly using LIDAR techniques. Landforms portal Geomorphology Land List of landforms Open-geomorphometry project Terrain Open-Geomorphometry Project
Street light
A street light, light pole, street lamp, light standard, or lamp standard is a raised source of light on the edge of a road or path. When urban electric power distribution became ubiquitous in developed countries in the 20th century, lights for urban streets followed, or sometimes led. Many lamps have light-sensitive photocells that activate automatically when light is or is not needed: dusk, dawn, or the onset of dark weather; this function in older lighting systems could have been performed with the aid of a solar dial. Many street light systems are being connected underground instead of wiring from one utility post to another. Early lamps were used by Greek and Roman civilizations, where light served the purpose of security, both to protect the wanderer from tripping on the path over something or keeping the potential robbers at bay. At that time oil lamps were used predominantly as they provided a moderate flame; the Romans had a word'laternarius', a term for a slave responsible for lighting the oil lamps in front of their villas.
The use of street lighting was first recorded in the city of Antioch from the 4th century. It was recorded in the Caliphate of Córdoba from the 9th–10th centuries in Cordova. In the Middle Ages, so-called "link boys" escorted people from one place to another through the murky winding streets of medieval towns. Before incandescent lamps, candle lighting was employed in cities; the earliest lamps required that a lamplighter tour the town at dusk. According to some sources, illumination was ordered in London in 1417 by Sir Henry Barton, Mayor of London though there is no firm evidence of this. In 1524, Paris house owners were required to have lanterns with candles lit in front of their houses at night, but the law was ignored. Following the invention of lanterns with glass windows, which improved the quantity of light, in 1594 the police of Paris took charge of installing lanterns in each city neighborhood. Still, in 1662, it was a common practice for travelers to hire a lantern-bearer if they had to move at night through the dark, winding streets.
Lantern bearers were still common in Paris until 1789. In 1667, under King Louis XIV, the royal government began installing lanterns on all the streets. There were three thousand in place by 1669, twice as many by 1729. Lanterns with glass windows were suspended from a cord over the middle of the street at a height of twenty feet and were placed twenty yards apart. A much-improved oil lantern, called a réverbère, was introduced between 1745 and 1749; these lamps were attached to the top of lampposts. During the French Revolution, the revolutionaries found that the lampposts were a convenient place to hang aristocrats and other opponents; the first widespread system of street lighting used piped coal gas as fuel. Stephen Hales was the first person who procured a flammable fluid from the actual distillation of coal in 1726 and John Clayton, in 1735, called gas the "spirit" of coal and discovered its flammability by accident. William Murdoch was the first to use this gas for the practical application of lighting.
In the early 1790s, while overseeing the use of his company's steam engines in tin mining in Cornwall, Murdoch began experimenting with various types of gas settling on coal-gas as the most effective. He first lit his own house in Redruth, Cornwall in 1792. In 1798, he used gas to light the main building of the Soho Foundry and in 1802 lit the outside in a public display of gas lighting, the lights astonishing the local population. In Paris, gas lighting was first demonstrated in November 1800 at a private residence on the rue Saint-Dominique, was installed on a covered shopping street, the Passage des Panoramas, in 1817; the First gas lamps on the streets of Paris appeared in January 1829 on the place du Carrousel and the rue de Rivoli on rue de la Paix, place Vendôme, rue de Castiglione. A Parisian writer enthused in August, 1857: "That which most enchants the Parisians is the new lighting by gas of the boulevards... From the church of the Madeleine all the way to rue Montmartre, these two rows of lamps, shining with a clarity white and pure, have a marvelous effect."
The gaslights installed on the boulevards and city monuments in the 19th century gave the city the nickname "The City of Light." The first public street lighting with gas was demonstrated in Pall Mall, London on 28 January 1807 by Frederick Albert Winsor. In 1812, Parliament granted a charter to the London and Westminster Gas Light and Coke Company, the first gas company in the world came into being. Less than two years on 31 December 1813, the Westminster Bridge was lit by gas. Following this success, gas lighting spread to other countries; the use of gas lights in Rembrandt Peale's Museum in Baltimore in 1816 was a great success. Baltimore was the first American city with gas streetlights, provided by Peale's Gas Light Company of Baltimore; the first place outside London in England to have gas lighting, was Preston, Lancashire in 1816, this was due to the Preston Gaslight Company run by revolutionary Joseph Dunn, who found the most improved way of brighter gas lighting. Oil-gas appeared in the field as a rival of coal-gas.
In 1815, John Taylor patented an apparatus for the decomposition of "oil" and other animal substances. Public attention was attracted to "oil-gas" by the display of the patent apparatus at Apothecary's Hall, by Taylor & Martineau; the first modern street lamps to use kerosene were introduced in Lviv in what was the Austrian Empire in 1853. In Brest, street lighting with kerosene lamps reappeared in 2009 in the shoppi
Hedge
A hedge or hedgerow is a line of spaced shrubs and sometimes trees and trained to form a barrier or to mark the boundary of an area, such as between neighbouring properties. Hedges used to separate a road from adjoining fields or one field from another, of sufficient age to incorporate larger trees, are known as hedgerows, they serve as windbreaks to improve conditions for the adjacent crops, as in bocage country. When clipped and maintained, hedges are a simple form of topiary; the development of hedges over the centuries is preserved in their structure. The first hedges enclosed land for cereal crops during the Neolithic Age; the farms were with fields about 0.1 hectares for hand cultivation. Some hedges date from the Bronze and Iron Ages, 2000–4000 years ago, when traditional patterns of landscape became established. Others were built during the Medieval field rationalisations. Many hedgerows separating fields from lanes in the United Kingdom and the Low Countries are estimated to have been in existence for more than seven hundred years, originating in the medieval period.
The root word of'hedge' is much older: it appears in the Old English language, in German, Dutch to mean'enclosure', as in the name of the Dutch city The Hague, or more formally's Gravenhage, meaning The Count's hedge. Charles the Bald is recorded as complaining in 864, at a time when most official fortifications were constructed of wooden palisades, that some unauthorized men were constructing haies et fertés – interwoven hedges of hawthorns. In parts of Britain, early hedges were destroyed to make way for the manorial open-field system. Many were replaced after the Enclosure Acts removed again during modern agricultural intensification, now some are being replanted for wildlife. A hedge may consist of a single species or several mixed at random. In many newly planted British hedges, at least 60 per cent of the shrubs are hawthorn and hazel, alone or in combination; the first two are effective barriers to livestock. Other shrubs and trees used include holly, oak and willow. Of the hedgerows in the Normandy region of France, Martin Blumenson said, The hedgerow is a fence, half earth, half hedge.
The wall at the base is a dirt parapet that varies in thickness from one to four or more feet and in height from three to twelve feet. Growing out of the wall is a hedge of hawthorn, brambles and trees, in thickness from one to three feet. Property demarcations, hedgerows protect crops and cattle from the ocean winds that sweep across the land; the hedgerows of Normandy became barriers that slowed the advance of Allied troops following the D-Day invasion of WWII. Formal, or modern garden hedges are grown in many varieties, including the following species: Berberis thunbergii Buxus sempervirens Carpinus betulus Crataegus monogyna Fagus sylvatica Fagus sylvatica ‘Purpurea’ Ilex aquifolium Ligustrum ovalifolium Photinia fraseri Prunus laurocerasus Prunus lusitanica Quercus ilex Taxus baccata Thuja occidentalis Thuja plicata Hedgerow trees are trees that grow in hedgerows but have been allowed to reach their full height and width. There are thought to be around 1.8 million hedgerow trees in Britain with 98% of these being in England and Wales.
Hedgerow trees are both an important part of the English landscape and valuable habitats for wildlife. Many hedgerow trees are veteran trees and therefore of great wildlife interest; the most common species are oak and ash, though in the past elm would have been common. Around 20 million elm trees, most of them hedgerow trees, were felled or died through Dutch elm disease in the late 1960s. Many other species are used, notably including beech and various fruit trees; the age structure of British hedgerow trees is old because the number of new trees is not sufficient to replace the number of trees that are lost through age or disease. New trees can be established by planting but it is more successful to leave standard trees behind when laying hedges. Trees should be left at no closer than 10 metres apart and the distances should vary so as to create a more natural landscape; the distance allows the young trees to develop full crowns without competing or producing too much shade. It is suggested that hedgerow trees cause gaps in hedges but it has been found that cutting some lower branches off lets sufficient light through to the hedge below to allow it to grow.
Hedges are recognised as part of a cultural heritage and historical record and for their great value to wildlife and the landscape. They are valued too for the major role they have to play in preventing soil loss and reducing pollution, for their potential to regulate water supply and to reduce flooding. In addition to maintaining the health of the environment, hedgerows play a huge role in providing shelter for smaller animals like birds and insects. Recent study by Emma Coulthard mentioned the possibility that hedgerows may act as guides for moths, like A. rumicis, when flying from one location to another. As moths are nocturnal, it is unlikely that they use visual aids as guides, but rather are following sensory or olfactory markers on the hedgerows. Hedges were used as a source of firewood, for providing shelter from wind, rain an
Containment
Containment is a geopolitical strategy to stop the expansion of an enemy. It is loosely related to the term cordon sanitaire, used to describe the geopolitical containment of the Soviet Union in the 1920s; the strategy of "containment" is best known as a Cold War foreign policy of the United States and its allies to prevent the spread of communism after the end of World War II. As a component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to the Soviet Union's move to increase communist influence in Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America. Containment represented a middle-ground position between rollback; the basis of the doctrine was articulated in a 1946 cable by U. S. diplomat George F. Kennan during the post-WWII administration of U. S. President Harry S. Truman; as a description of U. S. foreign policy, the word originated in a report Kennan submitted to U. S. Defense Secretary James Forrestal in 1947, used in a magazine article. There were major historical precedents familiar to Europeans. In the 1850s, anti-slavery forces in the United States developed a free soil strategy of containment, without using the word, to stop the expansion of slavery until it collapsed.
Historian James Oakes explains the strategy: The Federal government would surround the south with free states, free territories, free waters, building what they called a'cordon of freedom' around slavery, hemming it in until the system's own internal weaknesses forced the slave states one by one to abandon slavery. Between 1873 and 1877, Germany intervened in the internal affairs of France's neighbors. In Belgium and Italy, Bismarck exerted strong and sustained political pressure to support the election or appointment of liberal, anticlerical governments; this was part of an integrated strategy to promote republicanism in France by strategically and ideologically isolating the clerical-monarchist regime of President Patrice de Mac-Mahon. It was hoped that by ringing France with a number of liberal states, French republicans could defeat MacMahon and his reactionary supporters; the modern concept of containment provides a useful model for understanding the dynamics of this policy. Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, there were calls by Western leaders to isolate the Bolshevik government, which seemed intent on promoting worldwide revolution.
In March 1919, French Premier Georges Clemenceau called for a cordon sanitaire, a ring of non-communist states, to isolate the Soviet Union. Translating that phrase, U. S. President Woodrow Wilson called for a "quarantine." Both phrases compare communism to a contagious disease. The World War I Allies launched an incursion into Russia, ostensibly to create an eastern front against Germany. In reality, the policy was anti-Bolshevik as well, its economic warfare took a major toll on all of Russia. By 1919, the intervention was anti-communist, although the unpopularity of the assault led it to be withdrawn; the US engaged in covert action against the new Soviet government, involving the work of a young Allen Dulles. While the campaigns were pro-democracy, they supported the White Terror of former Tsarist generals like GM Semenov and Alexander Kolchak; the U. S. refused to recognize the Soviet Union, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt reversed the policy in 1933 in the hope to expand American export markets.
The Munich Agreement of 1938 was a failed attempt to contain Nazi expansion in Europe. The U. S. tried to contain Japanese expansion in Asia in 1937 to 1941, Japan reacted with its attack on Pearl Harbor. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 during World War II, the U. S. and the Soviet Union found themselves allied against Germany and used rollback to defeat the Axis Powers: Germany and Japan. Key State Department personnel grew frustrated with and suspicious of the Soviets as the war drew to a close. Averell Harriman, U. S. Ambassador in Moscow, once a "confirmed optimist" regarding U. S.-Soviet relations, was disillusioned by what he saw as the Soviet betrayal of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising as well as by violations of the February 1945 Yalta Agreement concerning Poland. Harriman would have a significant influence in forming Truman's views on the Soviet Union. In February 1946, the U. S. State Department asked George F. Kennan at the U. S. Embassy in Moscow, why the Russians opposed the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
He responded with a wide-ranging analysis of Russian policy now called the Long Telegram: Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventuristic. It does not work by fixed plans, it does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of reason, it is sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can withdraw—and does when strong resistance is encountered at any point. According to Kennan: The Soviets perceived themselves to be in a state of perpetual war with capitalism. Kennan's cable was hailed in the State Department as "the appreciation of the situation that had long been needed." Kennan himself attributed the enthusiastic reception to timing: "Six months earlier the message would have been received in the State Department with raised eyebrows and lips pursed in disapproval. Six months it would have sounded redundant." Clark Clifford and George Elsey produced a report
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