I think what you are looking for is exactly OpenStack Heat Project http://wiki.openstack.org/Heat The project is under active development.
Your question is making some assumptions that isn't quite correct - there's a lot of different types of clouds - Google AppEngine, OpenShift, Heroku and Azure (for example) work at a very different layer than the cloud services you get from Amazon AWS, CloudStack, OpenStack, etc.
I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.