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Nearly 40 years after the concept of finite deterrence was popularized by the Johnson administration, nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) thinking appears to be in decline. The United States has rejected the notion that threatening population centers with nuclear attacks is a legitimate way to assure deterrence. Most recently, it withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an agreement based on MAD. American opposition to MAD also is reflected in the Bush administration's desire to develop smaller, more accurate nuclear weapons that would reduce the number of innocent civilians killed in a nuclear strike. Still, MAD is influential in a number of ways. First, other countries, like C...
Sokolski examines the United States' efforts to prevent the spread of strategic weapons since 1945 and draws on its history to recommend how to improve future nonproliferation policies. The most comprehensive historical analysis of U.S. nonproliferation policy ever written.
Henry Sokolski has written an excellent, short book about what he sees as our not so peaceful nuclear future. While short in length, it covers a lot of ground, and because it is extensively footnoted, it can lead readers to the broader literature. The book provides a good picture of the growing stockpiles of separated plutonium and the stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, as well as the likely expansion of nuclear power programs in additional countries. When reading the book, my thoughts turned to the Per Bak book, How Nature Works, and the concept of self-organized criticality and its descriptions of computer simulations and experiments leading to avalanches in sandpiles. This may be a useful way of thinking about the possible consequences for nuclear weapon proliferation as the stockpiles of fi ssile material grow.
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Little more than a year ago, the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC) completed its initial analysis of Iran's nuclear program, Checking Iran's Nuclear Ambitions. Since then, Tehran's nuclear activities and public diplomacy have only affirmed what this analysis first suggested: Iran is not about to give up its effort to make nuclear fuel and, thereby, come within days of acquiring a nuclear bomb. Iran's continued pursuit of uranium enrichment and plutonium recycling puts a premium on asking what a more confident nuclear-ready Iran might confront us with and what we might do now to hedge against these threats. These questions are the focus of this volume. The book is divided into f...
This publication is an edited volume of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetters' key writings relating to nuclear proliferation and national security affairs, with commentaries by the Wohlstetters' colleagues and students. It also serves as a testament to the continuing relevance of the work of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter in the fields of nuclear and security policy analysis. Albert and Roberta wrote hundreds of articles and studies on U.S. policy on the Balkans, as well as the Persian Gulf; strategic command and control; intelligence and warning; NATO nuclear planning; U.S.-Russian arms control; strategic and theater missile defenses; the economics and military dangers of civilian nuclear energy...
The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to publish Prevailing In A Well-Armed World: Devising Competitive Strategies Against Weapons Proliferation. This work provides insights into the competitive strategies methodology. Andrew Marshall notes that policymakers and analysts can benefit by using an analytical tool that stimulates their thinking-more directly-about strategy in terms of long-term competition between nations with conflicting values, policies, and objectives. Part I of this work suggests that the competitive strategies approach has value for both the practitioner and the scholar. The book also demonstrates the strengths of the competitive strategies approach as an instrument fo...
With most of the world's advanced economies now stuck in recession; Western support for defense cuts and nuclear disarmament increasing; and a major emerging Asian power at odds with its neighbors and the United States; it is tempting to think our times are about to rhyme with a decade of similar woes—the disorderly 1930s.Might we again be drifting toward some new form of mortal national combat? Or, will our future more likely ape the near-half-century that defined the Cold War—a period in which tensions between competing states ebbed and flowed but peace mostly prevailed by dint of nuclear mutual fear and loathing?The short answer is, nobody knows. This much, however, is clear: The stra...
At the height of the Cultural Revolution a Chinese long-range nuclear missile is fired within the country, and the nuclear warhead it is carrying detonates. A French nuclear device is exploded in Algeria during a coup there. The Soviet empire has collapsed, and shots are fired at a Russian crowd intent on rushing a nuclear weapons-laden plane straining to remove a stash of nuclear weapons to a safer locale. Pakistani civilian governments are routinely pushed aside by a powerful, nuclear-armed military that observers worry might yet itself fall prey to a faction willing to seize a portion of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. This volume reveals previously unknown details on each case and teases out what is to be learned. This book is ideal not only for policymakers and analysts, but for historians and teachers as well.
Making the case that we can use nuclear power to combat climate change even as we reduce the risks of nuclear terror. Humanity faces two existential threats: nuclear annihilation and catastrophic climate change. Both have human origins, and both are linked to the use of nuclear energy. Inherent in the use of atomic fission is the risk that the technology and materials can be diverted to terrorists or hostile nations and used to make nuclear weapons. The key question is whether we can use nuclear energy to reduce the threat of climate change without increasing the risk that nuclear weapons will be used. In Double Jeopardy, Daniel Poneman argues that the world needs an “all-of-the-above” e...