Ballistic Weapons Research Articles

Medical press of the First World War period: Construction of social reality

Introduction. The First World War is a forgotten and completely unhonored page in the history of Ukraine. Instead, events and facts related to it are actively investigated in many European countries. In journalism and journalism studies, the topic of activity of specialized newspaper and magazine editions of medical topics was not investigated in that period, therefore, a picture of the emergence, formation, and development of such a press was not created, and its systematization was not carried out. Relevance and goal. The goal of the research is to analyze the problem-thematic components of specialized medical periodicals and continuing publications of the First World War period (1914–1918), to find out the peculiarities of their emergence and activity, and to introduce the specified press into scientific circulation. The relevance is formed by the lack of a comprehensive study of the activities of the specialized newspaper and magazine medical press of the specified period, its systematization, and problem-thematic priorities. Methodology. Descriptive methods are used as a basis during the research, which allows us to penetrate the causes of this or that phenomenon, find out the main stages of its development, the influence of a specific situation on the nature of events and phenomena; and compare local phenomena with general historical processes. Based on the periodization of the history of the development of the Ukrainian press proposed by the Research Institute of Press Studies, the study focuses on the fifth period – Ukrainian periodicals of the First World War 1914–1917. Results. The beginning of the First World War led to the closure of many publications. This was caused by increased censorship and financial problems of publishers. However, new periodicals also appeared during this period. In particular, 6 editions of military-medical topics were published: «Voenno-sanitarnii obzor» (1917), «Vrachebno-sanitarnie izvestiya Upravleniya Glavnoupolnomochennogo Krasnogo Kresta Yugo-Zapadnogo fronta» (1916–1918), «Izvestiya Kievskoi rentgenovskoi komissii» (1915–1917), «Nash zhurnal» (1917), «Nashe slovo» (1917), «Pomoshch ranenim» (1914). The thematically mentioned editions focused primarily on essential problems that arose in society with the development of military operations. The authors focused on the treatment of injuries from new ballistic weapons, rapid-fire machine guns, gas gangrene, damage by mustard gas and chlorine, the spread of epidemic diseases on the fronts, etc. Conclusions. The research gives reasons to state that during this period, 6 editions were published, which, based on typological characteristics, we include in the military-medical press. Their pages were dominated by messages related to the struggle for the lives of the wounded and the organization of military medical aid. These publications played one of the leading roles in the representation of military reality.

Welfare effects of substituting traditional police ballistic weapons with non-lethal alternatives

The introduction of non-lethal weapons for police and special trained forces is justified with reduced impacts on health and safety in for all those involved in missions. Current medical research therefore focuses on health-related effects on a case by case perspective. A purely economic view, however, identifies cost/benefit-related facts only regarding cost of ownership comprising materials, service, replacement and training. While each approach is reasonable and adequate from both points of view, we aim at enhancing this discussion by an overall medico-economic dimension. This article aims to shed light on the overall welfare effects of substituting traditional ballistic firearms with non-lethal weapons using the example of conducted electrical weapons (CEW), such as the Taser. In order to answer this question the total costs of traditional ballistic firearms are compared to the total cost of CEW. Consequently, probability of use serves as an antecedent in the model, whereas the cost of application results as a logical consequence. Based on these considerations, the threshold level of application can be determined. The model was tested with a dataset consisting of Taser applications in England and Wales from 2009 and 2010. As a result, the overall welfare effects of substituting traditional ballistic firearms with non-lethal weapons for police and special armed forces can be estimated and therefore contribute to the decision-making process from a medico-economic welfare perspective.

Japan’s New Security Legislation: What Does This Mean to East Asian Security?

ABSTRACTIt is obvious that the security environment in East Asia is more unstable and unpredictable. In the South China Sea, tensions over disputed islands initiate a more severe Sino–American rivalry. In the East China Sea, China disputes the control over the Senkaku Islands, and is escalating military activities around those islands. North Korea continues provocative activities including launching of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons tests. This naturally leads to the idea that Japan needs to play a larger role to restore stability in the international order. This paper explores the challenges facing East Asian security in the face of the passage of Japan's new security bills in 2015 and how they impact the future of Japanese security policy.

The Development of the US National Missile Defense and its Impact on the International Security

The article reflects the US officials' point of view on the development of its national missile defense. The major threat to international security is the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. The United States and the former Soviet Union made huge efforts to reduce and limit offensive arms. However, presently the proliferation of ballistic missiles spreads all over the world, especially in the Middle East, because of the ballistic missile technology falling into the hands of hostile non-state groups. Missile defenses can provide a permanent presence in a region and discourage adversaries from believing they can use ballistic missiles to coerce or intimidate the U.S. or its allies. With the possible attack regional missile defense systems will be promptly mobilized to enhance an effective deterrent. The ultimate goal of such large-scale missile defense deployment is to convince the adversaries that the use of ballistic missiles is useless in military terms and that any attack on the United States and its allies is doomed to failure. The United States has missile defense cooperative programs with a number of allies, including United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Israel, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Poland, Italy and many others. The Missile Defense Agency also actively participates in NATO activities to maximize opportunities to develop an integrated NATO ballistic missile defense capability. The initiative of the development of US BMD naturally belongs to the United States. That country has enormous technological, financial, economic, military and institutional capabilities, exceeding by far those of the other NATO members combined.

Conditional Deterrence and Missile Defense

The traditional view of ballistic missile defense is that defensive weapons are destabilizing. This article explains why the more broadly and traditionally accepted classical approach to deterrence is flawed and demonstrates the greater explanatory power and implications of conditional deterrence based on power parity theory. Given the implications that can be drawn from conditional deterrence, this article demonstrates that limited efforts at developing and deploying missile defenses enhance deterrence and reduce the ballistic missile threat in the short term and may also discourage the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

United States - Japan Cooperation in Ballistic Missile Defense Development: Capabilities in Facing the Threat of Ballistic Missiles and Weapons of Mass Destruction

United States - Japan Cooperation in Ballistic Missile Defense Development: Capabilities in Facing the Threat of Ballistic Missiles and Weapons of Mass Destruction

Infection and combat injuries

Blast and ballistic weapons used on the battlefield cause devastating injuries rarely seen outside armed conflict. These extremely high-energy injuries predominantly affect the limbs and are usually heavily contaminated with soil, foliage, clothing and even tissue from other casualties. Once life-threatening haemorrhage has been addressed, the military surgeon’s priority is to control infection. Combining historical knowledge from previous conflicts with more recent experience has resulted in a systematic approach to these injuries. Urgent debridement of necrotic and severely contaminated tissue, irrigation and local and systemic antibiotics are the basis of management. These principles have resulted in successful healing of previously unsurvivable wounds. Healthy tissue must be retained for future reconstruction, vulnerable but viable tissue protected to allow survival and avascular tissue removed with all contamination. While recent technological and scientific advances have offered some advantages, they must be judged in the context of a hard-won historical knowledge of these wounds. This approach is applicable to comparable civilian injury patterns. One of the few potential benefits of war is the associated improvement in our understanding of treating the severely injured; for this positive effect to be realised these experiences must be shared.

American Studies after the Internet

American Studies after the Internet Lauren Frederica Klein (bio) The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Expertise. By Nathan Ensmenger. MIT Series in the History of Computing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010. 336 pages. $30.00 (cloth). Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. By Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. MIT Series in Software Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011. 256 pages. $32.00 (cloth). Race after the Internet. Edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White. New York: Routledge Press, 2011. 352 pages. $150.00 (cloth). $39.95 (paper). Debates in the Digital Humanities. Edited by Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 504 pages. $105.00 (cloth). $34.95 (paper). June 1945: The height of the war in the Pacific, Allied forces in Germany had only just assumed control of the recently defeated nation, and in the United States, citizens continued to mourn the loss of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, their wartime commander in chief. In the midst of this global tumult, six women were summoned to the U.S. Army’s Ballistics Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland, where they were assigned to the top-secret “Project X.” As the women would soon discover, Project X was the code name for the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) project, an enterprise that would culminate in the world’s first electronic, digital, and programmable computer. Upon its completion, in 1946, the ENIAC machine was immediately deployed to calculate the firing tables required for the precision targeting of the Army’s long-range ballistic weapons. However, the “ENIAC girls,” as the women who operated the machine were known, would be acknowledged for their pioneering role in the history of computing—for they were the world’s first computer programmers—only fifty years after the fact.1 [End Page 861] The surprise of this story is not only how strongly it resonates with many of the issues engaged by American studies today—such as the gendering and valuation of labor (or lack thereof) and the rise of the U.S. military-industrial complex—but also that it has only recently begun to be mined for its significance as the starting point of today’s digital culture. It suggests, moreover, how the fields of American studies and the digital humanities, so often viewed as disciplinarily, methodologically, and ontologically distinct, are in fact deeply intertwined. For decades, the creation of digital tools and the application of digital methods was the purview of “humanities computing,” a close-knit field of dedicated practitioners. Renamed the digital humanities in the early 2000s, the field has since been extended to encompass what Kathleen Fitzpatrick describes in her contribution to Debates in the Digital Humanities as the array of “changes that digital technologies are producing across the many fields of humanistic inquiry” (12).2 But if the digital humanities is to become an umbrella term for a generalized epistemology of the digital, it is of the utmost importance that we understand the origins and implications of the digital itself. The origins of the digital humanities are most often traced to 1949, when an Italian Jesuit priest, Father Roberto Busa, approached IBM with an idea of employing a computer to compile an index verborum of the complete works of Thomas Aquinas—nearly eleven million words of medieval Latin.3 This story, replete with anecdotes about punch-cards trucked through narrow, sixteenth-century streets, establishes intellectual ambition, technological resourcefulness, and a not insignificant amount of whimsy as the foundational values in the field. The story of the “ENIAC girls” reveals a more complex prehistory, however—one that, as Nathan Ensmenger’s Computer Boys Take Over and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Programmed Visions each demonstrate, is shot through with contradiction. Indeed, the history of the digital humanities, in both its original and its expanded meanings, is also, necessarily, a history of gender, labor, empire, and—as I discuss below—race. And the ideological and conceptual systems that underpin each of these terms are, in ways that have not yet been sufficiently acknowledged, informed by our ideas about and experience with the digital.4 When Tara McPherson, at the 2011 American Studies Association annual meeting, posed the question...

Radar measurements analysis for spatial object classification

This paper presents a method for estimating orbital parameters of spatial objects detected with a ground based radar dedicated to space surveillance. The radar objective are twofold: detection; classification of the detected objects. We firstly describe how the orbit determination is performed using radar acquisitions (right ascension, declination, range and Doppler). We then present the procedure of differentiation between different spatial objects (satellites, ballistic weapons...) on real time applications. An analysis of the influence of noise and of the samples number in the accuracy of this procedure is also presented.

Is Missile Defence Moral?

INTRODUCTIONOn 17 December 2002, President George W. Bush announced his intention to deploy a missile defence system capable of destroying incoming ballistic weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), thereby sparking in Canada another agonizing debate about our role in this initiative.This debate culminated in Prime Minister Martin's March 2005 decision to have Canada not participate in missile defence. There is no need to reflect on the domestic reasons that are the source of this refusal; our American neighbours understand that Martin's administration had been moving towards a rapprochement with Washington since Chretien's departure, and that his decision is not based on any animosity.Martin's decision is grounded in the logic of political survival, not on the merits or demerits of missile defence per se. Those who lament his decision will say that Canada is losing a at the table, although the value and the weight of our sitting anywhere can be debated. Others, such as officials in the Department of Foreign Affairs, may regret not being able to consolidate claims for more open access to American government defence and research contracts for Canadian firms (as per NAFTA rules), although there is no guarantee that participation in missile defence would help our bargaining position on any trade issue with the US. Yet others may be relieved that Canada's reputation will not be soiled by participation in what they see as a dangerous scheme, although our continued role in NORAD amounts to de facto participation.But what the latter may not realize is that not being at the table hinders Canada in pressing for its underlying interests to be recognized, namely, comprehensive nuclear disarmament and the non-weaponization of space. Should another opportunity to retake our seat occur, perhaps the domestic realities of Canadian politics could be reconciled with the new strategic realities and the opportunities they offer as expressed in the following argument. This is an attempt to demonstrate the conditions under which a defensive transition through missile defence deployment can trigger a reduction in nuclear stockpiles. It is an essay about strategic philosophy and morality, a mental experience whose hypothesis is difficult to verify. The hypothesis is that BMD can reconcile a defensive transition with disarmament, making such systems moral weapons.This article is not about the history of nuclear strategy. It is about strategic thinking as it is modified by the double impact of defensive systems and the application of a positivist praxis in international relations. The demonstration proceeds with a definition of morality or ethics in relation to nuclear weapons. The notion of morality, as defined, is set against a brief survey of the positions that emerged for and against missile defence in the two periods identified below (1983-86 and 1998-2002).The sources used for this paper were drawn from a thorough analysis of the literature. This revealed that the most sustained debate about BMD for both periods was articulated by Keith Payne and Colin Gray in Comparative Strategy. Other views on the subject were also commonplace in earlier issues of the CII A's International Journal and in the Council on Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs. The predominance of those sources reflects the direction of a debate that has yet to be concluded, and its impact on Canada's strategic position vis-a-vis the US.The point of departure for this article is that the conditions that lead to a positivist or constructivist assessment of national security are borne out of the collapse of the superpower confrontation, and that this development can more easily bring about the deployment of missile defence, which, to be effective, must take into account new threats and a reasonable chance of success of defeating them.I MORALITY AND NUCLEAR WARMichael Walzer suggests that [n]uclear war is and will remain morally unacceptable, and there is no case for its rehabilitation. …

Gulf Cooperation Council Threat Perceptions Deterrence Objectives

This article highlights existing threat perceptions in the Arab world, with a special emphasis on the Gulf region in order to determine who the oil-rich states are attempting to deter through their steady buildup of arms since the mid eighties. Based on interviews with Middle Eastern policy makers and experts, this article concludes that GCC States have their own distinct threat perceptions. In addition to terrorism, proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction constitute the main sources of threat to Gulf countries. The signing of defense pacts with Western powers, and the possession of an advanced high-tech arsenal of conventional weapons and contemplating the deployment of a regional missile defense shield seem to be means to develop a powerful deterrent to protect GCC states against threats from the north and the east.

Japan's Push for missile defence

The Japan Defense Agency hopes to introduce by 2007 a two-phase, layered ballistic missile shield based on existing United States technology. This will involve a lower-tier Patriot (PAC-3) surface-to-air missile capability designed to intercept cruise and ballistic missiles close to the terminal stage of their flight trajectories, and an upper-tier, exo-atmospheric defence involving Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) boosters mounted on Aegis-equipped destroyers. These plans represent a radical shift in policy, which until now has stressed only precautionary research and development in collaboration with the US. They are intended to confront East Asia's expanding ballistic missile and Weapons of Mass Destruction threats, principally those emanating from North Korea.

Democratic America in Northeast Asia: U.S. Strategy, Missile Defense and Implications for Allied Defense Relationships*

This article examines the potential impacts of U.S. missile defense coupled with the updated national security strategy on allied defense relationships with Japan and South Korea. Facing predominantly asymmetric threats from the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction from actors including rogue states such as North Korea, the U.S. has embarked on a long‐term plan for deploying missile defenses. However, in the near‐term, the technological feasibility may not correspond with the current official rhetoric concerning missile defenses. Failure to recognize potential sources of conflicts stemming from these issues within the alliances could fundamentally weaken both America's military strategy and the political foundations of the alliances.

U.S. strategic nuclear forces, end of 1998

Quantitative data on operational nuclear weapons is tabulated and described in some detail in the article. Nuclear weapons categories reported include intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and bombers and weapons. The total number of warheads in the U.S. arsenal is approximately 7150, slightly lower than last year`s level of almost 8000 warheads. There are 1085 launchers and nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines.

Zulu Zip-Guns and an Unusual Murder

Primitive ballistic weapons are used in great numbers in Zululand, South Africa. Their manufacture reflects various degrees of skill. A case with a bullet and a cartridge in the victim is discussed, and a representative pictorial exhibition of weapons is presented.

Edwin Ginn's Commitment to World Government

Edwin Ginn's vision of world peace, as recorded in his last will and testament, involved him in a commitment to world government. World government, however, is an objective which seems to many mid-twentieth century observers of international politics excessively visionary. The nineteenth-century dream of a parliament of man, a federation of the world, fills a bright page in Victorian poetry. But much contemporary prose is written by men whose vision is obscured by space rockets, intercontinental ballistic missiles, atomic bombs, and other lethal weapons of ultramodern warfare. They see only a world of heavily armed, self-styled sovereign states bent on the protection of alleged vital interests and on the defense of so-called national honor with little patience for the restraints of any higher law designed to prevent them from making war upon one another.

Terminal Guidance by Pattern Recognition-A New Approach

The development of the function-ensemble-average concept of automatic image displacement determination permits a practical realization of terminal guidance for ballistic weapons systems. In this paper the fundamentals of this concept are developed both theoretically and experimentally. Illustrative examples are presented.