Conventional Forces Research Articles

Missile Defense and Extended Deterrence in the Japan-US Alliance

Abstract As long as the United States remains vulnerable to an attack with long-range nuclear missiles, Japanese confidence in US extended deterrence would rest on the ability of Tokyo and Washington to (1) maintain a favorable balance in conventional forces most relevant to the defense of Japan, (2) avoid provoking the potential adversary into threatening a nuclear assault against Japan and (3) fasten the bilateral relationship so as to impress the adversary about the possibility of US response with strategic nuclear weapons in case he launched such an assault. Further Japanese cooperation in the US theater missile defense (TMD) program would generally have positive effects as regards the first and third conditions above, although management of the process might be quite challenging. The impact on the second condition would be harder to judge, largely because it is difficult to predict how missile defense in East Asia might affect Chinese nuclear strategy.

Deterrence and conventional military forces

Abstract : The search for national security strategy periodically opens major policy debates that push us in new, sometimes revolutionary directions. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war have reopened a national debate unmatched since the end of World War II. Dramatic changes in the international system have forced us to reevaluate old strategies and look for new focal points amidst the still unsettled debris of the bipolar world. At issue is America's role in a new world order and our capabilities to defend and promote our national interests in a new environment where threats are both diffuse and uncertain, where conflict is inherent, yet unpredictable. The degree of uncertainty requires flexibility in our military strategy and significant departures from cold war concepts of deterrence. This study examines new options for deterrence. Its primary thesis is that new conditions in both the international and domestic environments require a dramatic shift from a nuclear to a conventional force dominant deterrent. The study identifies the theories and strategies of nuclear deterrence that transfer to modern conventional forces in a multipolar world.

Unarmed forces: the transnational movement to end the Cold War

Throughout the Cold War, people worldwide feared that the U.S. and Soviet governments could not prevent a nuclear showdown. Citizens from both East-bloc and Western countries, among them prominent scientists and physicians, formed networks to promote ideas and policies that would lessen this danger. Two of their organizations-the Pugwash movement and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War-won Nobel Peace Prizes. Still, many observers believe that their influence was negligible and that the Reagan administration deserves sole credit for ending the Cold War. The first book to explore the impact these activists had on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain, Unarmed Forces demonstrates the importance of their efforts on behalf of arms control and disarmament. Matthew Evangelista examines the work of transnational peace movements throughout the Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev eras and into the first years of Boris Yeltsin's leadership. Drawing on extensive research in Russian archives and on interviews with Russian and Western activists and policymakers, he investigates the sources of Soviet policy on nuclear testing, strategic defense, and conventional forces. Evangelista concludes that transnational actors at times played a crucial role in influencing Soviet policy-specifically in encouraging moderate as opposed to hard-line responses-for they supplied both information and ideas to that closed society. Evangelista's findings challenge widely accepted views about the peaceful resolution of the Cold War. By revealing the connection between a state's domestic structure and its susceptibility to the influence of transnational groups, Unarmed Forces will also stimulate thinking about the broader issue of how government policy is shaped.

Seismic Behaviour of Space Structures

Investigations show that the seismic behaviour of space structures may fundamentally differ from the conventional structures. This paper presents the results of dynamic analyses of double-layer barrel vaults with different configurations and support conditions subjected to a severe earthquake, and highlights some basic influential elements in seismic performance of the space structures. The effect of higher modes of vibration has been examined. The significance of the presence of snow loads on dynamic characteristics and seismic performance of space structures is emphasized. Various hysteresis models were used, and the effects of strength reduction and energy dissipation in compression struts were investigated. The results generally indicate that the induced seismic forces are enormously larger than the conventional seismic forces. The consequences of this finding on seismic design of space structures have been discussed, and remedial suggestions have been proposed.

Cold cataracts: a naturally occurring aqueous two-phase system

The cytoplasm of the eye lenses shows a liquid–liquid phase transition similar to the one observed in aqueous two-phase systems. This phenomenon is known as cold cataracts. We have studied the solution behavior of the main protein fractions that constitute the lenses’ cytoplasm using small-angle neutron scattering and dynamic light scattering. Our results provide evidence that an intricate balance of forces underlines the physical phenomena responsible for the optical properties of the lenses and for the phase transition that is observed as the temperature is lowered below some critical value. These forces include solvent-mediated forces besides the more conventional Coulombic and dispersion forces. This study suggests that solvent mediated forces must be included to successfully model liquid–liquid phase transitions like the ones observed in cold cataracts or in aqueous two-phase systems.

Taiwan's military

Heightened tensions between mainland China and Taiwan in the build-up to the inauguration of Chen Shui-bian as Taiwan’s president have focused attention on the island’s ability to defend itself. For the time being, the island’s defences appear strong. But it is also clear that if China continues to build up its conventional forces, the military balance will tip against Taiwan. Even if the United States decides to transfer more sophisticated weaponry to the island, Taiwan may find itself in an inferior military position some time in the second half of this decade.

Molecular statistical model for adsorbed membrane particles

Indirect membrane-mediated forces influence aggregation, segregation and freezing processes of large particles inserted into a membrane or adsorbed to its surface. Colloidal particles, polymers, peptides and proteins are the source of deformations of the lipid double layer. These perturbations cause membrane-mediated attractive or repulsive forces between the particles. A molecular statistical treatment is useful for investigating the lateral organization of peripheral and trans-membrane peptides. To describe aggregation and freezing phenomena a density functional, which includes conventional short-range forces and membrane-mediated effects, is proposed. The method is applied to an ensemble of adsorbed peptides. It is investigated how the elastic splay-distortion modulus, the surface tension, the compression-expansion modulus of the bilayer and the cross-section of adsorbed particles influence aggregation and freezing. Assuming conventional values for the material parameters, membrane-mediated attractive forces are found to be sufficiently strong to enforce aggregation.

The Origins of MBFR: West German Policy Priorities and Conventional Arms Control

Negotiations on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions, 1973-86, continued for a long time without progress. Research in East German archives confirms that the Warsaw Pact sought to protect its existing advantage in conventional forces in Europe. The conventional view is that the Western side was against any reductions and that the political objectives of the talks (for the Eastern side the conclusion of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), for the Western side the maintenance of domestic support for troop commitments to Europe) were achieved without any progress in the negotiations. This view is challenged by research in German archives which shows that for a time there was strong support in the West German government for far more ambitious goals, seeing the talks as a mechanism to affect fundamentally the structure of European security on the basis of more radical force reductions. This paper analyses these documents in the context of West German Ostpolitik and Alliance politics.

Military reform and strategic nuclear forces of the Russian federation

Russian Minister of Defense Marshal Igor Sergeyev has proposed merging the Strategic Rocket Forces and strategic nuclear components of the Navy and Air Force. Advocates of the proposed reform invoke Russia's need to increase its reliance on nuclear weapons in view of the decline in its conventional forces, as well as the potential savings from the merger. Critics of the plan view it as favoring the Strategic Rocket Forces at the expense of the rest of the military, and as prohibitively expensive. The NATO campaign in Kosovo has made Marshal Sergey ev vulnerable to criticism for emphasizing nuclear forces over conventional ones, and the plan has been put on hold.

The scale independence of evolution.

In this paper, I argue that the ultimate causes of morphological, and hence developmental, evolution are scale independent. In other words, micro- and macroevolutionary patterns show fundamental similarities and therefore are most simply explained as being caused by the same kinds of evolutionary forces. I begin by examining the evolution of single lineages and argue that dynamics of adaptive evolution are the same for bacteria in test-tube evolution experiments and fossil lineages. Similarly, I argue that the essential features of adaptive radiations large and small can be attributed to conventional forces such as mutation and diversifying natural selection due to competition. I then address recent claims that the molecular features of metazoan development are the result of clade-level selection for evolvability, and suggest that these features can be more easily explained by conventional individual-level selection for the suppression of deleterious pleiotropic effects. Finally, I ask what must be known if we are to understand the ultimate causes of molecular and developmental diversity.

Integrated project teams: The MoD's new hot potato?

With the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union, the monolithic threat to Western Europe evaporated and many governments took the opportunity to gather a ‘peace dividend’ from the new situaton. This has meant the reduction of defence budgets and the reallocation of those funds to other areas of public spending. However, the ‘New World Order’ has taken a direction which is rather different from that forecast. Instead of the one major threat, there is now a multitude of smaller ones, which cannot be met with large conventional forces stationed on the Central Front, but will have to be countered by smaller intervention forces capable of rapid projection.

Brownian Motion in Multiphase Flow

A previous phenomenological theory for Brownian motion of rigid spherical particles in a flowing fluid (Ramshaw, 1979, 1981) is extended to multiphase mixtures and arbitrary flow regimes. It is argued that each phase i possesses its own intrinsic osmotic pressure q i =n i k B T, where n i is the mean number of discrete particles (i.e., inclusions, fragments, blobs, or chunks) of phase i per unit total volume, regardless of their rigidity or their size and shape distributions. The gradient of q i appears as an additional force term in the momentum equation for phase i. The osmotic pressures q i also contribute to the total pressure p of the mixture, so these contributions must be subtracted out before the conventional multiphase pressure forces are computed. The resulting pressure terms in the momentum equation for phase i then become −α i ν(p−q)−νq i , where α i is the volume fraction of phase i and q=∑ i q i . This formulation provides a single unified description of the flow of both multiphase mixtures and multicomponent gases, and exhibits a smooth transition between these two limiting cases as the particle sizes vary from macroscopic to molecular dimensions. The stability properties of the equations are examined in the incompressible limit, and it is found that the Brownian motion stabilizes and regularizes the system only for microscopically small relative velocities.

Global action to prevent war: A programme for government and Grassroots efforts to stop war, genocide and other forms of deadly conflict

Summary At the end of history's bloodiest century and the outset of a new millennium, we have an opportunity to fulfil one of humanity's oldest dreams: making the world largely free of war. Global changes make this goal achievable. Nuclear weapons have shown the folly of war. For the first time, there is no war and no immediate prospect of war among the main military powers. For the first time, many proven measures to prevent armed conflict, distilled in the crucible of this century's wars, are available. If systematically applied, these measures can sharply decrease the frequency and violence of war, genocide, and other forms of deadly conflict. To seize the opportunity, nations should adopt a comprehensive programme to reduce conventional armaments and armed conflict. This programme will complement and strengthen efforts to eliminate nuclear arms. To assure its ongoing worldwide implementation, the conventional reduction programme should be placed in a treaty framework. We propose a four‐phased process, with three treaties, each lasting five to ten years, to lay the groundwork for the fourth treaty, which will establish a permanent international security system. The main objectives of the treaties are to achieve: 1. A verified commitment to provide full transparency on conventional armed forces and military spending, not to increase forces during negotiations on arms reductions, and to increase the resources allocated to multilateral conflict prevention and peacekeeping. 2. Substantial worldwide cuts in national armed forces and military spending and further strengthening of United Nations and regional peacekeeping and peace‐enforcement capabilities. 3. A trial of a watershed commitment by participating nations, including the major powers, not to deploy their armed forces beyond national borders except in a multilateral action under UN or regional auspices. 4. A permanent transfer to the UN and regional security organizations of the authority and capability for armed intervention to prevent or end war, accompanied by further substantial cuts in national armed forces and increases in UN and regional forces. This programme offers many valuable features: a global framework for conventional forces that parallels the nuclear Non‐Proliferation Treaty; a verified no‐increase commitment for national armed forces based on full data exchange; a commitment to undertake prescribed confidence‐building measures, including limits on force activities and deployments; a commitment to a specified plan for increased funding of UN and regional peacekeeping capabilities; a commitment to strengthen international legal institutions; and after a trial period, a lasting commitment by each participant not to unilaterally deploy its armed forces beyond its borders, but instead to give the responsibility for peacekeeping and peace enforcement to international institutions. This programme of phased steps to reduce armed forces and strengthen peacekeeping institutions will make war rare. It will foster the spread of zones of peace like those in North America and Western Europe where, after centuries of violence, international and civil war have given way to the peaceful settlement of disputes.

Flux Expulsion and Field Evolution in Neutron Stars

Models for the evolution of magnetic fields of neutron stars are constructed, assuming the field is embedded in the proton superconducting core of the star. The rate of expulsion of the magnetic flux out of the core, or equivalently the velocity of outward motion of flux-carrying proton-vortices is determined from a solution of the Magnus equation of motion for these vortices. A force due to the pinning interaction between the proton-vortices and the neutron-superfluid vortices is also taken into account in addition to the other more conventional forces acting on the proton-vortices. Alternative models for the field evolution are considered based on the different possibilities discussed for the effective values of the various forces. The coupled spin and magnetic evolution of single pulsars as well as those processed in low-mass binary systems are computed, for each of the models. The predicted lifetimes of active pulsars, field strengths of the very old neutron stars, and distribution of the magnetic fields versus orbital periods in low-mass binary pulsars are used to test the adopted field decay models. Contrary to the earlier claims, the buoyancy is argued to be the dominant driving cause of the flux expulsion, for the single as well as the binary neutron stars. However, the pinning is also found to play a crucial role which is necessary to account for the observed low field binary and millisecond pulsars.

Chechnya: A Glimpse of Future Conflict?

Netwar, an emerging mode of conflict engaged in by networked, mostly nonstate actors is associated most with social activism (e.g., the Zapatistas), terror (e.g., bin Laden's Al Qaeda) and crime (e.g., the Asian triads). However, netwar can also manifest itself in highly militarized settings, particularly in the context of ethnonationalist conflict. The recent war in Chechnya provides a good example of how netwar can be used in extremely violent ways to confront and overcome the much larger conventional forces of nationstates. In this conflict, a network of clan-based Chechen fighters, organized in closely internetted small fighting cells, was able to defeat a valorous, but still-hierarchical, balky Russian army in the field. This case is also analytically important because the Chechens employed a wide range of netwaroriented activities, from social activism to terror and strategic crime in order to complement their military netwar.

Détente and conventional arms control: West German policy priorities and the origins of MBFR

The standard view of the negotiations on mutual and balanced force reductions 1973–86 is that no progress was made because the Warsaw Pact sought to protect its existing advantage in conventional forces in Europe, while the western side was against any reductions. Moreover, the political objectives of the talks (for the eastern side the conclusion of CSCE, for the western side the maintenance of domestic support for troop commitments to Europe) were achieved without any progress in the negotiations. Research in German archives shows that for a time there was strong support in the west German government for far more ambitious goals seeing the talks as a mechanism to affect fundamentally the structure of European security on the basis of more radical force reductions. This paper analyses the results of this research, its influence on the official west German position on MBFR and the interaction with the decision‐making process in the NATO alliance.

Nuclear Deterrence in the Developing World: A Game-Theoretic Treatment

There has been an increasing debate over the consequences of proliferation and the viability of deterrence in the newly-nuclear states, with the scholarly community generally splitting into two opposed and mutually exclusive groups. One set of scholars believes in the efficacy of deterrence and thus tends to favor proliferation, while another loose grouping of research efforts questions the viability of deterrence in the developing countries. The former group has generally pitched its arguments at an abstract level (primarily through non-formal research), while the latter group has based its critiques on specific countries or on subtopics within the theory of deterrence (such as the fragility of command and control systems). This article is an attempt to synthesize and formalize the key questions and concepts of this debate through both a literature review and a game model of complete and perfect information that allows for crisis escalation at the conventional and nuclear levels of conflict. After noting several logical inconsistencies in the extant pro-proliferation and pro-deterrence research, the article resolves many of the key issues through a formal study of the interactions between threat credibility, threat capability, and the dynamics of escalation. The results show some severe weaknesses in the pro-proliferation school: nuclear blackmail is still a possibility in dyads that experience asymmetric proliferation or in dyads where threat credibility at the nuclear level favors one side; nuclear weapons generally fail to bridge the gap left by incapable conventional forces; and status quo stability is intimately tied to variations in preference orderings, even when both sides possess capable nuclear threats. Contrary to the findings of the pro-proliferation school, deterrence between developing countries is neither simple nor preordained.

A consistent co-rotational finite element formulation for geometrically nonlinear dynamic analysis of 3-D beams

A co-rotational total Lagrangian finite element formulation for the geometrically nonlinear dynamic analysis of spatial Euler beam with large rotations but small strain, is presented. The nodal coordinates, displacements, rotations, velocities, accelerations, and the equations of motion of the structure are defined in a fixed global set of coordinates. The beam element has two nodes with six degrees of freedom per node. The element nodal forces are conventional forces and moments. The kinematics of beam element are defined in terms of element coordinates, which are constructed at the current configuration of the beam element. Both the element deformation nodal forces and inertia nodal forces are systematically derived by consistent linearization of the fully geometrically nonlinear beam theory using the d'Alembert principle and the virtual work principle in the current element coordinates. An incremental-iterative method based on the Newmark direct integration method and the Newton—Raphson method is employed here for the solution of the nonlinear equations of motion. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method.

A Continuum-Mechanical Theory for Nematic Elastomers

We develop a continuum theory for the mechanical behavior of rubber-like solids that are formed by the cross-linking of polymeric fluids that include nematic molecules as elements of their main-chains and/or as pendant side-groups. The basic kinematic ingredients of this theory are identical to those arising in continuum-level theories for nematic fluids: in addition to the deformation, which describes the trajectories of material particles, an orientation, which delineates the evolution of the nematic microstructure, is introduced. The kinetic structure of our theory relies on the precept that a complete reckoning of the power expended during the evolution of a continuum requires the introduction of forces that act conjugate to each operative kinematic variable and that to each such force system there should correspond a distinct momentum balance. In addition to conventional deformational forces, which expend power over the time-rate of the deformation and enter the deformational (or linear) momentum balance, we, therefore, introduce a system of orientational forces, which expend power over the time-rate of the orientation and enter an additional orientational momentum balance. We restrict our attention to a purely mechanical setting, so that the thermodynamic structure of our theory rests on an energy imbalance that serves in lieu of the first and second laws of thermodynamics. We consider only nematic elastomers that are incompressible and microstructurally inextensible, and a novel aspect of our approach concerns our treatment of these material constraints. We refrain both from an a priori decomposition of fields into active and reactive components and an introduction of Lagrange multipliers; rather, we start with a mathematical decomposition of the dependent fields such as the deformational stress based on the geometry of the constraint manifold. This naturally gives rise to active and reactive components, where only the former enter into the energy imbalance because the latter automatically expend zero power in processes consistent with the constraints. The reactive components are scaled by multipliers which we take to be constitutively indeterminate. We assume constitutive equations for the active components, and the requirement that these equations be consistent with the energy imbalance in all processes leads to the active components being determined by an energy density response function of the deformation gradient, the orientation, and the orientation gradient. We formulate the requirements of observer independence and material symmetry for such a function and provide, as a specialization, an expression that encompasses the energy densities used in the Mooney-Rivlin description of rubber and the Oseen-Zocher-Frank description of nematic fluids.

Vingt ans de négociations sur le désarmement et la maîtrise des armements

Twenty Years of Disarmament Negotiations and Arms Control, by Jean Klein Over the past twenty years, disarmament negotiations and arms control have been marked by an alternation of successes and setbacks, and the agreements concluded tended mainly to stabilize the balance of deterrence between the two nuclear protagonists, to reduce conventional forces in the area extending from the Atlantic to the Urals and to regulate, or even ban, chemical wea-pons and anti-personnel mines. Until the collapse of the bipolar world order, it was mainly a matter of organizing the strategie status quo and of reducing the risks of surprise attack. Since then some breakthroughs have been achieved with a view to genuine disarmament and some measures have been taken to consolidate the regime of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. However, the obstacles that have arisen along this road and the paralysis of the multilateral negotiations in Geneva bode ill for the contribution of disarmament to the establishment of a new security order.