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Author: Lynn Eden
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801472893
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
The author explores how the US government has underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons, leading it to build far more - and far more destructive - warheads than are needed for war-planning purposes. She explores how this could have happened and the consequences for defense policy.
Author: Lynn Eden
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801472893
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
The author explores how the US government has underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons, leading it to build far more - and far more destructive - warheads than are needed for war-planning purposes. She explores how this could have happened and the consequences for defense policy.
Author: Lynn Eden
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801435782
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
Whole World on Fire focuses on a technical riddle wrapped in an organizational mystery: How and why, for more than half a century, did the U.S. government fail to predict nuclear fire damage as it drew up plans to fight strategic nuclear war?U.S. bombing in World War II caused massive fire damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but later war plans took account only of damage from blast; they completely ignored damage from atomic firestorms. Recently a small group of researchers has shown that for modern nuclear weapons the destructiveness and lethality of nuclear mass fire often--and predictably--greatly exceeds that of nuclear blast. This has major implications for defense policy: the U.S. government has underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons, Lynn Eden finds, and built far more warheads, and far more destructive warheads, than it needed for the Pentagon's war-planning purposes. How could this have happened? The answer lies in how organizations frame the problems they try to solve. In a narrative grounded in organization theory, science and technology studies, and primary historical sources (including declassified documents and interviews), Eden explains how the U.S. Air Force's doctrine of precision bombing led to the development of very good predictions of nuclear blast--a significant achievement--but for many years to no development of organizational knowledge about nuclear fire. Expert communities outside the military reinforced this disparity in organizational capability to predict blast damage but not fire damage. Yet some innovation occurred, and predictions of fire damage were nearly incorporated into nuclear war planning in the early 1990s. The author explains how such a dramatic change almost happened, and why it did not. Whole World on Fire shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't do well, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences. In a sweeping conclusion, Eden shows the implications of the analysis for understanding such things as the sinking of the Titanic, the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and the poor fireproofing in the World Trade Center.
Author: Lynn Eden
Publisher: Manas Publications
ISBN: 9788170492061
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
Focuses on a technical riddle wrapped in an organizational mystery: How and why, for more than half a century, the US govt failed to predict nuclear fire damage as it drew up plans to fight strategic nuclear war.
Author: Alex Wellerstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226833445
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 558
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Book Description
The first full history of US nuclear secrecy, from its origins in the late 1930s to our post–Cold War present. The American atomic bomb was born in secrecy. From the moment scientists first conceived of its possibility to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and beyond, there were efforts to control the spread of nuclear information and the newly discovered scientific facts that made such powerful weapons possible. The totalizing scientific secrecy that the atomic bomb appeared to demand was new, unusual, and very nearly unprecedented. It was foreign to American science and American democracy—and potentially incompatible with both. From the beginning, this secrecy was controversial, and it was always contested. The atomic bomb was not merely the application of science to war, but the result of decades of investment in scientific education, infrastructure, and global collaboration. If secrecy became the norm, how would science survive? Drawing on troves of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time through the author’s efforts, Restricted Data traces the complex evolution of the US nuclear secrecy regime from the first whisper of the atomic bomb through the mounting tensions of the Cold War and into the early twenty-first century. A compelling history of powerful ideas at war, it tells a story that feels distinctly American: rich, sprawling, and built on the conflict between high-minded idealism and ugly, fearful power.
Author: Richard M. Price
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729543
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Richard M. Price asks why, among all the ominous technologies of weaponry throughout the history of warfare, chemical weapons carry a special moral stigma. Something more seems to be at work than the predictable resistance people have expressed to any new weaponry, from the crossbow to nuclear bombs. Perceptions of chemical warfare as particularly abhorrent have been successfully institutionalized in international proscriptions and, Price suggests, understanding the sources of this success might shed light on other efforts at arms control.To explore the origins and meaning of the chemical weapons taboo, Price presents a series of case studies from World War I through the Gulf War of 1990–1991. He traces the moral arguments against gas warfare from the Hague Conferences at the turn of the century through negotiations for the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. From the Italian invasion of Ethiopia to the war between Iran and Iraq, chemical weapons have been condemned as the "poor man's bomb." Drawing upon insights from Michel Foucault to explain the role of moral norms in an international arena rarely sensitive to such pressures, he focuses on the construction of and mutations in the refusal to condone chemical weapons.
Author: Stephen Peter Rosen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501732315
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
How and when do military innovations take place? Do they proceed differently during times of peace and times of war? In Winning the Next War, Stephen Peter Rosen argues that armies and navies are not forever doomed to "fight the last war." Rather, they are able to respond to shifts in the international strategic situation. He also discusses the changing relationship between the civilian innovator and the military bureaucrat. In peacetime, Rosen finds, innovation has been the product of analysis and the politics of military promotion, in a process that has slowly but successfully built military capabilities critical to American military success. In wartime, by contrast, innovation has been constrained by the fog of war and the urgency of combat needs. Rosen draws his principal evidence from U.S. military policy between 1905 and 1960, though he also discusses the British army's experience with the battle tank during World War I.
Author: Max Wallace
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312335311
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 498
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Book Description
Examines how Charles Lindbergh's support for Nazi militarism and U.S. isolationism and Henry Ford's business dealings with Germany tarnished their idealized images. Drawing on original lsources, Wallace brings out some pertinent connections between the two men's anti-Semitism and their ties with the rising Nazi regime. Their influence culminated in an abuse of power that helped strengthen Hitler's regime and undermined the Allied war effort.
Author: Matthys Levy
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393311525
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
About the reasons for structural collapse, including earthquakes, metal fatigue, and terrorism.
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."
Author: Gar Alperovitz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780671061500
Category : Soviet Union
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
