Busting Myths about Nuclear Deterrence - America Does Not Use Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Weapons Have Only Limited Utility for Their Cost, Nukes Are Going Away, U. S. Can Deter with Submarines Alone

Busting Myths about Nuclear Deterrence - America Does Not Use Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Weapons Have Only Limited Utility for Their Cost, Nukes Are Going Away, U. S. Can Deter with Submarines Alone PDF Author: U. S. Military
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781521134658
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
This unique study analyzes four myths about American nuclear weapons and the nuclear deterrence they provide. America is embarked on a quest for a world without nuclear weapons, but we live in a world not yet safe from war and threats of war. Hence, as long as nuclear weapons exist, the United States must maintain a safe, secure, and effective arsenal--both to deter potential adversaries and to assure US allies and other security partners that they can count on US security commitments. Our nuclear posture communicates to potential nuclear-armed adversaries that they cannot use nuclear threats to intimidate the United States, its allies, or partners or escalate their way out of failed conventional aggression. The United States Air Force (USAF) will continue to maintain its responsibilities as steward of two of the nation's three legs of the strategic nuclear triad and the nation's associated nuclear command, control, and communications infrastructure.Since the Cold War, three states (India, Pakistan, and North Korea) have developed nuclear-weapon capabilities, while Iran remains on course to do so. Moreover, ongoing nuclear modernization programs in China and Russia point to the continued importance of nuclear deterrence and assurance for our allies and partners. Some countries now have military doctrines that include potential first use of nuclear weapons in a militarized crisis, and these countries regularly exercise those doctrines. These threats require the United States to seriously consider its responsibility to educate and advocate for the commitment and investment needed to sustain nuclear deterrence capabilities in a dangerous world.

Busting Myths about Nuclear Deterrence - America Does Not Use Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Weapons Have Only Limited Utility for Their Cost, Nukes Are Going Away, U. S. Can Deter with Submarines Alone

Busting Myths about Nuclear Deterrence - America Does Not Use Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Weapons Have Only Limited Utility for Their Cost, Nukes Are Going Away, U. S. Can Deter with Submarines Alone PDF Author: U. S. Military
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781521134658
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Get Book Here

Book Description
This unique study analyzes four myths about American nuclear weapons and the nuclear deterrence they provide. America is embarked on a quest for a world without nuclear weapons, but we live in a world not yet safe from war and threats of war. Hence, as long as nuclear weapons exist, the United States must maintain a safe, secure, and effective arsenal--both to deter potential adversaries and to assure US allies and other security partners that they can count on US security commitments. Our nuclear posture communicates to potential nuclear-armed adversaries that they cannot use nuclear threats to intimidate the United States, its allies, or partners or escalate their way out of failed conventional aggression. The United States Air Force (USAF) will continue to maintain its responsibilities as steward of two of the nation's three legs of the strategic nuclear triad and the nation's associated nuclear command, control, and communications infrastructure.Since the Cold War, three states (India, Pakistan, and North Korea) have developed nuclear-weapon capabilities, while Iran remains on course to do so. Moreover, ongoing nuclear modernization programs in China and Russia point to the continued importance of nuclear deterrence and assurance for our allies and partners. Some countries now have military doctrines that include potential first use of nuclear weapons in a militarized crisis, and these countries regularly exercise those doctrines. These threats require the United States to seriously consider its responsibility to educate and advocate for the commitment and investment needed to sustain nuclear deterrence capabilities in a dangerous world.

Getting MAD: Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, Its Origins and Practice

Getting MAD: Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, Its Origins and Practice PDF Author:
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1428910336
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
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 China, have not abandoned the idea that holding their adversaries' cities at risk is necessary to assure their own strategic security. Nor have U.S. and allied security officials and experts fully abandoned the idea. At a minimum, acquiring nuclear weapons is still viewed as being sensible to face off a hostile neighbor that might strike one's own cities. Thus, our diplomats have been warning China that Japan would be under tremendous pressure to go nuclear if North Korea persisted in acquiring a few crude weapons of its own. Similarly, Israeli officials have long argued, without criticism, that they would not be second in acquiring nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Indeed, given that Israelis surrounded by enemies that would not hesitate to destroy its population if they could, Washington finds Israel's retention of a significant nuclear capability totally "understandable."

The Second Nuclear Age

The Second Nuclear Age PDF Author: Colin S. Gray
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9781555873318
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The author takes issue with the complacent belief that a happy mixture of deterrence, arms control and luck will enable humanity to cope adequately with weapons of mass destruction, arguing that the risks are ever more serious.

Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy

Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy PDF Author: Todd S. Sechser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110710694X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Are nuclear weapons useful for coercive diplomacy? This book argues that they are useful for deterrence but not for offensive purposes.

On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century

On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century PDF Author: Jeffrey A Larsen
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804790914
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
These essays by nuclear policy experts provide “a speculative but serious and well-informed journey through a variety of scenarios and contingencies” (Foreign Affairs). Recent decades have seen a slow but steady increase in nuclear armed states, and in the seemingly less constrained policy goals of some of the newer “rogue” states in the international system. The authors of On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century argue that a time may come when one of these states makes the conscious decision that using a nuclear weapon against the United States, its allies, or forward deployed forces in the context of a crisis or a regional conventional conflict may be in its interests. They assert that we are unprepared for these types of limited nuclear wars and that it is urgent we rethink the theory, policy, and implementation of force related to our approaches to this type of engagement. Together they critique Cold War doctrine on limited nuclear war and consider a number of the key concepts that should govern our approach to limited nuclear conflict in the future. These include identifying the factors likely to lead to limited nuclear war; examining the geopolitics of future conflict scenarios that might lead to small-scale nuclear use; and assessing strategies for crisis management and escalation control. Finally, they consider a range of strategies and operational concepts for countering, controlling, or containing limited nuclear war. “A series of trenchant essays that deconstruct a critical national security challenge that most of us wish did not exist. Assembling a star-studded cast of scholars, analysts, and policy practitioners, Larsen and Kartchner have produced some of the most important new thinking on an old topic.” —H-Diplo

Tailored Deterrence

Tailored Deterrence PDF Author: Barry R. Schneider
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780974740386
Category : Arms control
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description


Uranium Enrichment and Nuclear Weapon Proliferation

Uranium Enrichment and Nuclear Weapon Proliferation PDF Author: Allan S. Krass
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100020054X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Originally published in 1983, this book presents both the technical and political information necessary to evaluate the emerging threat to world security posed by recent advances in uranium enrichment technology. Uranium enrichment has played a relatively quiet but important role in the history of efforts by a number of nations to acquire nuclear weapons and by a number of others to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. For many years the uranium enrichment industry was dominated by a single method, gaseous diffusion, which was technically complex, extremely capital-intensive, and highly inefficient in its use of energy. As long as this remained true, only the richest and most technically advanced nations could afford to pursue the enrichment route to weapon acquisition. But during the 1970s this situation changed dramatically. Several new and far more accessible enrichment techniques were developed, stimulated largely by the anticipation of a rapidly growing demand for enrichment services by the world-wide nuclear power industry. This proliferation of new techniques, coupled with the subsequent contraction of the commercial market for enriched uranium, has created a situation in which uranium enrichment technology might well become the most important contributor to further nuclear weapon proliferation. Some of the issues addressed in this book are: A technical analysis of the most important enrichment techniques in a form that is relevant to analysis of proliferation risks; A detailed projection of the world demand for uranium enrichment services; A summary and critique of present institutional non-proliferation arrangements in the world enrichment industry, and An identification of the states most likely to pursue the enrichment route to acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy

Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy PDF Author: Francis J. Gavin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780815737919
Category : Nuclear arms control
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Exploring what we know--and don't know--about how nuclear weapons shape American grand strategy and international relations A 2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title The world first confronted the power of nuclear weapons when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The global threat of these weapons deepened in the following decades as more advanced weapons, aggressive strategies, and new nuclear powers emerged. Ever since, countless books, reports, and articles--and even a new field of academic inquiry called "security studies"--have tried to explain the so-called nuclear revolution. Francis J. Gavin argues that scholarly and popular understanding of many key issues about nuclear weapons is incomplete at best and wrong at worst. Among these important, misunderstood issues are: how nuclear deterrence works; whether nuclear coercion is effective; how and why the United States chose its nuclear strategies; why countries develop their own nuclear weapons or choose not to do so; and, most fundamentally, whether nuclear weapons make the world safer or more dangerous. These and similar questions still matter because nuclear danger is returning as a genuine threat. Emerging technologies and shifting great-power rivalries seem to herald a new type of cold war just three decades after the end of the U.S.-Soviet conflict that was characterized by periodic prospects of global Armageddon. Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy helps policymakers wrestle with the latest challenges. Written in a clear, accessible, and jargon-free manner, the book also offers insights for students, scholars, and others interested in both the history and future of nuclear danger.

On Theories of Victory, Red and Blue

On Theories of Victory, Red and Blue PDF Author: Brad Roberts
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781952565014
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
While the United States and its allies put their military focus on the post-9/11 challenges of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency, Russia and China put their military focus onto the United States and the risks of regional wars that they came to believe they might have to fight against the United States. Their first priority was to put their intellectual houses in order-that is, to adapt military thought and strategic planning to the new problem. The result is a set of ideas about how to bring the United States and its allies to a "culminating point" where they choose to no longer run the costs and risks of continued war. This is the "red theory of victory." Beginning in the second presidential term of Obama administration, the U.S. military focus began to shift, driven by rising Russian and Chinese military assertiveness and outspoken opposition to the regional security orders on their peripheries. But U.S. military thought has been slow to catch up. As a recent bipartisan congressional commission concluded, the U.S. intellectual house is dangerously out of order for this new strategic problem. There is no Blue theory of victory. Such a theory should explain how the United States and its allies can strip away the confidence of leaders in Moscow and Beijing (and Pyongyang) in their "escalation calculus"-that is, that they will judge the costs too high, the benefits to low, and the risks incalculable. To develop, improve, and implement the needed new concepts requires a broad campaign of activities by the United States and full partnership with its allies.

Thinking about Deterrence

Thinking about Deterrence PDF Author: Air Univeristy Press
Publisher: Military Bookshop
ISBN: 9781782667100
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
With many scholars and analysts questioning the relevance of deterrence as a valid strategic concept, this volume moves beyond Cold War nuclear deterrence to show the many ways in which deterrence is applicable to contemporary security. It examines the possibility of applying deterrence theory and practice to space, to cyberspace, and against non-state actors. It also examines the role of nuclear deterrence in the twenty-first century and reaches surprising conclusions.