Preventive Strikes Research Articles

South Korean Cost Sensitivity and Support for Nuclear Weapons

How do the costs of proliferation shape the public support for building nuclear weapons? Public opinion matters, especially in a democracy, because the masses can affect the nuclear policy choices that political elites make. Yet the existing literature on nuclear proliferation has not incorporated the public’s cost sensitivity in the analysis. We therefore do not fully understand the sources of public attitudes toward nuclearization. By fielding a novel survey experiment in South Korea, I found that the economic and human costs of economic sanctions and preventive strikes dampen South Koreans’ preferences for nuclear armament. Relative to the no-cost condition, economic and human costs reduce the support levels by 25.1% points and 19.4% points, respectively and in the case of combined costs the support decreases by 29.6% points. However, South Koreans still have relatively high levels of support for a nuclear arsenal even after the exposure to the costs of nuclearization. This implies that the rally effect resulting from hostile international responses may mitigate the negative cost effects to some degree. This study can contribute to the growing literature by providing new theoretical foundations and empirical results.

Тенденции развития внешней политики США конца XX − первой четверти XXI века. Концептуальный аспект

This article analyses trends in US foreign policy of the late 20th and first decades of the 21st centuries as a major factor influencing modern geopolitics. The problem is considered in the theoretical aspect and in the historical-political retrospect, from the 1990s to the present day. The subject of the analysis is the stages of the formation of the foreign policy doctrine upheld by the USA in international relations. For the 1990s, the paper studies the doctrines asserting hegemony and unipolarity as the goals of US foreign policy in the geopolitical realities that took shape after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The period of 2000s – 2010s was, according to the author, a time of transformation in US foreign policy: from the adoption after September 11, 2001 of the so-called Bush Doctrine, giving the USA rights to launch preventive strikes and make interventions against states suspected of cooperation with international terrorist organizations, to the idea of abandoning claims to global hegemony and attempts to normalize relations with Russia (“reset” policy) and China (the Group of Two) during Barack Obama’s presidency. The final part of the article examines the period of Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s presidencies, when the USA returned to the idea of global hegemony, based on the ideological thesis that the USA is the leader of the free world opposing the world of autocracies, whose leaders are Russia and China. According to the author, the current situation reproduces the realities of the Cold War, with the confrontation between the USA as the “defender of the free world” and the USSR as the founder of the world communism movement. The author concludes by attempting to determine the reasons for the transformations in US foreign policy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries as well as to give a forecast of its development trends.

Rad na utvrđivanju granice sa Albanijom u Zetskoj divizijskoj oblasti

The border front in the Zeta division area was determined in accordance with thorough measures regarding fortification of the border with Albania. Although the plan of military operations predicted the offensive in this direction, i.e., the preventive strike in the Albanian territory, the activity was terminated by the main operator no. 6 from the headquarters of the 3rd Army division. This misunderstanding was the result of vague orders of the Ministry of the Army and the Navy, which, being responsible for the fortification also appointed the officers from the headquarters of the Zeta division for this activity. This inconsistency in turn led to delay, and this direction was fortified only in part.

Transformation of the U. S. National Strategy for Counterterrorism during the presidency of Barack Obama

Tracing the evolution of Barack Obama's National Strategy for Counterterrorism is relevant for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, foreign policy and globalist trends were the reason for coming to power of the next president-isolationist Donald Trump. Secondly, many experts believe that the current administration of the White House pursues a successive foreign policy course namely in relation to the concept of B. Obama. And ultimately, consideration of the factors that affect the transformation of foreign policy strategy, and its counterterrorism component in particular, may contribute to forecasting similar processes under other administrations. The conclusion is made that Barack Obama preferred multilateral cooperation over unilateral coercive course; and the vector towards harmonization of relations with the Muslim world triggered the revision of the “struggle against terrorism” paradigm of George Bush Jr. B. Obama’s administration declared the transition from the concept of preventive strikes towards the concept of “smart power” and “leading from behind”, which manifested in the course of anti-terrorist operation in Syria. The author notes that the activity of Barack Obama in countering international terrorism is characterized by the departure from the tactics of conducting large-scale and costly wars of George Bush Jr. to joint targeted counterterrorism operations.

Preventive military strike or preventive war? The fungibility of power resources

Differential rates of growth explanations for preventive war assume that power resources are highly fungible. That is, they assume that a state’s power resources are easily and quickly ‘moveable’ into practical military capability. This ‘unidimensional and undifferentiated’ baseline obscures an important distinction in the motivations for preventive military strikes and preventive wars. To forestall or block an anticipated adverse power shift, under conditions of perceived low fungibility of power resources, leaders have strong motivation to launch a limited preventive military strike. High fungibility of power, in contrast, makes only preventive strikes—not all preventive action—less likely. Leaders have strong motivations to launch preventive wars, including all-out invasion and conquest, aimed at damaging and/or destroying many of the challenger’s power assets, including non-threatening ones. In this article, I examine Israel’s decision to use preventive military force, and specifically military strikes, to delay Iraq’s (1981) and Syria’s (2007) nuclear weapons programs.

Risk-attitude-based defense strategy considering proactive strike, preventive strike and imperfect false targets

This paper analyzes the optimal strategies for the attacker and the defender in an attack–defense game, considering the risk attitudes of both parties. The defender moves first, allocating its limited resources to three different measures: launching a proactive strike or preventive strike, building false targets, and protecting its genuine object. It is assumed that (a) launching a proactive strike has limited effectiveness on its rival and does not expose the genuine object itself, (b) a false target might be correctly identified as false, and (c) launching a preventive strike consumes less resources than a proactive strike and might expose the genuine object. The attacker moves after observing the defender's movements, allocating its limited resources to three measures: protecting its own base from a proactive strike or preventive strike, building false bases, and attacking the defender's genuine object. For each of the defender's given strategies, the attacker chooses the attack strategy that maximizes its cumulative prospect value, which accounts for the players’ risk attitudes. Similarly, the defender maximizes its cumulative prospect value by anticipating that the attacker will always choose the strategy combination that maximizes its own cumulative prospect value. Backward induction is used to obtain the optimal defense, attack strategies, and their corresponding cumulative prospect values. Our results show that the introduction of risk attitudes leads the game to a lose-lose situation under some circumstances and benefits one party in other cases.

Underground alliances and preventive strikes: British intelligence and secret diplomacy during the Napoleonic Wars, 1807-1810

ABSTRACTThis article examines the role of intelligence in the formation of British war policy during the Napoleonic Wars, 1807–1810. During this period, intelligence was conceived of broadly and was inseparably linked with secret diplomacy; to attempt to separate these strands would be anachronistic. It shall be argued that a lack of professionalism and institutional support was one of the key factors that limited the effectiveness of intelligence but that nevertheless it exerted a significant influence over Britain’s war policy. Ultimately, it is argued that the intelligence dimension is central to understanding British policy during the Napoleonic Wars.

Object defence of a single object with preventive strike of random effect

Most existing research on system defence is restricted to passive measures such as providing redundancy, protecting system elements, and deploying false elements. Some recent works have considered the launching of preventive strikes, where a preventive strike, if successful, destroys all the attacker's resources. However, in practice, a preventive strike might cause a random loss to the attacker's resources. This paper assumes that the destroyable attacking resources follow a Poisson distribution. Procedures are presented to solve the optimal defence strategies for three cases: (1) where preventive strikes and object protections are the only available defence measures; (2) where false targets can also be deployed, and they are perfect; and (3) where false targets can also be deployed, but they are imperfect. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the applications, and sensitivity analysis is employed to demonstrate the influence of parameters.

Closing the Window of Vulnerability: Nuclear Proliferation and Conventional Retaliation

Living with a nuclear-armed enemy is unattractive, but, strangely, states seldom use their military power to prevent the enemy’s entry into the nuclear club. It is puzzling why preventive strikes against nuclear programs have been quite rare. I address this puzzle by considering the role of conventional retaliation, a subfield of deterrence that so far has received scant attention in the literature. I theorize the concept of conventional retaliation and test its explanatory power. First, I explore all historical cases where states struck another state’s nuclear installations and find none occurring when the proliferator threatened conventional retaliation. Second, I explore two cases where a strike was most likely, but the would-be attacker balked and find smoking-gun evidence that the threat of conventional retaliation restrained the would-be attacker. This evidence supports my claim that the threat of conventional retaliation is sufficient to deter a preventive strike against emerging nuclear states.

: , (((((((( ) (Tales of Gesar: Plots Originating in the Mongolian Tradition (Book and Oral Versions))

Russian Abstract: На примере генезиса и эволюции монгольской Гесериады можно проследить, как знакомство с тибетским эпическим сказанием и переработка его сюжетно-тематического ядра дают исходный импульс для создания общемонгольской эпопеи, обусловливают возникновение книжноэпической формы. Войдя в монгольские традиции как герой, очищающий землю от чудовищ, сын божества, посланник неба, восстановитель гармонического миропорядка, Гесер противостоит хаосу, демоническим и хтоническим силам, и это мифологическое амплуа у него сохраняется, в какие бы сюжетные контексты он ни попадал. В некоторых эпизодах тема очищения земли от чудовищ трактуется как борьба с демоническими правителями реальных и мифических государств, а в позднейших главах книжной версии она осмысливается как уничтожение по небесному предначертанию врагов буддийской религии, которые начинают восприниматься не как чудовища, властвующие в своем демоническом мире, а как демоны-насильники, чье вторжение в человеческий мир вынуждает Гесера наносить по ним превентивные удары. Сам же Гесер оказывается правителем идеального буддийского государства, чуть ли не вселенским монархом, «единственным сыном Будды Шакьямуни». Однако при всех интерпретациях исходный смысл (герой — сын небесного бога, очищающий землю от чудовищ и устанавливающий гармонический миропорядок) остается прежним. English Abstract: On example of genesis and evolution of Mongolian Geseriada, one can see how familiarity with Tibetan epic legend and processing of its subject-themed core give initial impetus for creation of a pan-Mongol epic, which cause emergence of a book-epic form. Entering Mongolian tradition as a hero, cleansing land from monsters, son of deity, messenger of heaven, restorer of harmonious world order, Gesar confronts chaos, demonic and chthonic forces, and this mythological role remains in him, no matter what plot contexts he falls into. In some episodes, theme of cleansing land from monsters is treated as a struggle against demonic rulers of real and mythical states, and in later chapters of book version it is interpreted as destroying enemies of Buddhist religion according to heavenly predestination. These enemies are perceived not as monsters ruling in their demonic world, but as demon-rapists, whose invasion of human world forces Gesar to deliver preventive strikes on them. Gesar himself turns out to be ruler of an ideal Buddhist state, almost a universal monarch, the only son of Buddha Shakyamuni. However, with all interpretations, original meaning (the hero is son of heavenly god, purifying earth of monsters and establishing a harmonious world order) remains same.

Furthering the ‘war on terrorism’ through international law: how the United States and the United Kingdom resurrected the Bush doctrine on using preventive military force to combat terrorism

ABSTRACTThis article revisits the Principles Relevant to the Scope of a State’s Right of Self-Defense Against an Imminent or Actual Armed Attack by Nonstate Actors published by Sir Daniel Bethlehem in the American Journal of International Law in 2012. As disclosed in documents revealed by WikiLeaks, the principles were the product of intergovernmental discussions led by the United States to secure greater understanding of the jus ad bellum that had their origins in the controversial ‘Bush doctrine’ published in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America in 2002. In 2017, the UK Attorney General announced that the UK ‘follows and endorses’ Principle 8 of ‘The Bethlehem Principles’, as did Australia’s Attorney General. Principle 8 reflects an expansion of the right of anticipatory self-defence by providing a new standard of imminence to enable preventive military strikes against threats outside traditional conflict zones.

Object defense with preventive strike and false targets

In this paper, optimal strategies for the defender and the attacker are studied. The defender moves first, allocating its limited resources into three diverse measures: launching a preventive strike, building false targets, and protecting the genuine object. It is assumed that launching a preventive strike will expose the genuine object, thus during this measure the defender will not simultaneously build false targets. The attacker moves after observing the actions taken by the defender, allocating its resources into three measures: protecting its own base from a preventive strike, building false bases, and attacking the genuine object. For each of the defender's given strategies, the attacker tries to maximize the destruction probability of the genuine object. Comparing the expected vulnerability of the object, the defender decides whether to launch a preventive strike or build false targets. The strategies of the attacker and the defender are illustrated with numerical examples, and the optimal strategies are found.

The Logic and Illogic of an Israeli Unilateral Preventive Strike on Iran

The Israeli political leadership has invested massively in preparing a credible preventive strike option on Iran’s nuclear program. The article assesses this option in the context of Israel’s operational acumen and strategic preferences. It points out to a critical gap between the capacity to achieve the operational objectives and the strategic utility of a preventive strike. It then discusses the logical fallacies underlying Israeli leaders’ explanations of how this gap would be overcome, assessing the potential downsides of a strike.

Book on Sakharov raises issues

Kojevnikov replies: My understandably disappointed respondents have not addressed the main criticism formulated in my review, namely that many contributors to Andrei Sakharov: The Conscience of Humanity cited Sakharov’s moral authority only to advance ideas and agendas that fundamentally contradict his humanitarian values. Here are some examples from the book: Retired general Jim Mattis invoked Sakharov while extolling the morality of the US military’s continuing engagement in the Middle East. Retired admiral James Ellis Jr, who commanded the 1999 NATO attack on Yugoslavia, used human rights as a justification for that and subsequent wars. He also suggested that a preemptive strike can “be viewed as an ethical imperative” against possible nuclear proliferation. Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes referred to Sakharov and human rights as the basis of her own work, which the media has since exposed as fraudulent corruption of science by commercialization.In contrast, Sakharov stood up against the high-level scientific frauds, hawkish politicians, and trigger-happy generals of his time. He resolutely opposed warmongering and preventive strikes, championed human rights as the basis for peace and reconciliation of ideological tensions but not for war, and criticized as “flagrant crimes against humanity” the superpowers’ military interventions in other countries, such as Vietnam and Afghanistan.In today’s world, the misuse of human rights arguments for violent ends has become widespread, and I felt obliged to remind readers that it contradicts Sakharov’s worldview. The letters call my summary “flawed,” “dubious,” and “questionable” but were not able to specify a single idea of Sakharov’s that I got wrong. I trusted his own writings rather than wishful misinterpretations by some later biographers, and although there was no space for long quotations, I did indicate how Sakharov’s ideas developed over time. The true legacy of the great humanist is absolutely incompatible with hawkish and neoconservative agendas and must not be used for such purposes.© 2017 American Institute of Physics.

Deterring a Nuclear-Armed Adversary in a Contested Regional Order: The “Trilemma” of U.S.–North Korea Relations

Deterring a Nuclear-Armed Adversary in a Contested Regional Order:The “Trilemma” of U.S.–North Korea Relations Van Jackson (bio) North Korea’s dogged pursuit of a nuclear and ballistic missile capability has never been the sole reason for its confrontational relationship with the United States. The issue sits at the intersection of multiple narratives about where North Korea fits in U.S. strategy toward Asia. From the U.S. perspective, North Korea is a deterrence challenge, a proliferation threat, and a dangerous wildcard in the increasingly contested regional order. Each of these views of North Korea implies different policy priorities, and each favors different ways of addressing the North Korean nuclear threat. The degree to which U.S. policy emphasizes different tools of statecraft depends on how each of these three narratives defines the North Korea problem. This “trilemma” helps explain why all past attempts to solve the North Korean nuclear puzzle have come up short. The complexity of the situation presents hard choices, which successive U.S. presidents have preferred to avoid, even though doing so has allowed the problem to grow worse and more disadvantageous for the United States over time. But “passing the buck” on a decisive course of action against North Korea is becoming untenable. President Donald Trump may not have the luxury of passivity and risk avoidance toward the North Korean nuclear problem. The United States is gradually being forced to take a more decisive approach that necessarily involves greater risk. But will it primarily be a domestic political, geopolitical, or military risk? The remainder of this essay will outline three different narratives about how the North Korean nuclear problem matters in U.S. strategy—as a war threat, as a nuclear proliferation threat, and as a threat to the regional order. Each section will identify the key priority within a narrative, as well as the relative importance of different tools of policy, from diplomacy and sanctions to deterrence and preventive strikes. The essay then highlights how these narratives exist as an uneasy triangle or trilemma: any attempt to [End Page 97] definitively address the North Korean nuclear problem from one perspective may require sacrificing a priority built into other perspectives. A Threat to Successful Deterrence Especially in defense circles, the highest priority for U.S. and regional interests has long been maintaining stability through deterrence. When deterrence-based stability is the overriding priority, barring a diplomatic miracle, the United States must effectively plan to live with a nuclear-armed North Korea. Diplomacy can help bolster deterrence but never undermine it. International sanctions are a peripheral concern. Preventive strikes on nuclear facilities are possible, but only if policymakers truly believe doing so would have a future deterrence benefit, which is debatable. A stability-first strategy toward North Korea involves preventing war through deterrence and getting a better grip on the provocation problem. First, deterrence of major war is a constant work in progress, not something to be taken for granted simply because the United States is the bigger power. Deterrence depends on a dynamic formula involving capabilities, interest, and resolve—what it takes to deter invasion or military adventurism changes depending on what North Korea does and has. North Korea tinkering with the size and composition of its military arsenal should compel the United States to frequently revisit contingency planning, force presence, and strategic signaling considerations. Second, whereas strategic deterrence has held on the Korean Peninsula for more than a half-century, tactical deterrence has repeatedly failed. North Korea has a long history of resorting to small-scale, isolated acts of militarized violence (“provocations”) against the United States and South Korea. U.S. policymakers have historically viewed these provocations as undesirable but basically acceptable as long as war did not break out anew.1 But provocations are becoming a newly unacceptable problem because of pressures from Seoul. Since 2010, when North Korea twice attacked the South, the latter vowed “manifold retaliation” against North Korea the next time it engaged in violent provocations, and South Korea has been adjusting its military capabilities, doctrine, and force posture to make good on that threat.2 In the wake of the 2010 attacks, South Korean public discourse...

How nuclear proliferation causes conflict: the case for optimistic pessimism

ABSTRACTThe claim that the spread of nuclear weapons leads to interstate conflict and nuclear war has become very influential. However, proliferation pessimists have failed to specify how and when nuclear proliferation precipitates conflict. I make four arguments for an optimistic pessimism. (1) The few preventive strikes against nuclear facilities that have occurred would have occurred absent of the target's nuclear program, and these rare strikes did not lead to conflict escalation. (2) The problem of nonsurvivable arsenals is, properly understood, a problem of preventive-war motivations where subjective uncertainty reduces the dangers of arsenal survivability. (3) Claims that bias within nuclear organizations may lead to accidental nuclear detonations suffer from omitted variable bias: leaders' decisions to revise the status quo after developing nuclear weapons tend to give rise to the most dangerous nuclear accidents. Accidents that have not occurred during a nuclear crisis pose substantially less risk of nuclear escalation. (4) Leaders of nuclear states have tended to engage in conventional aggression, but experience with nuclear weapons moderates their conflict propensity. Ultimately, I argue that while nuclear weapons have led to conflict through one causal mechanism and for a limited time, the dangers are substantially weaker than usually assumed.

Telling violence: the Toxcatl massacre at the Templo Mayor in sixteenth-century sources

In May 1520, on the day of the Feast of Toxcatl, a troop of Spaniards assaulted the Templo Mayor, the main temple in Mexico-Tenochtitlan. The incident was a turning point in the conquest of Mexico. In spite of this, the circulating descriptions have not been properly read against the primary documental sources or the historiographic antecedents that challenge their assertions. A survey of these sources suggests that the popular perceptions of the event owe less to the facts of the matter than to subsequent elaborations. In the different accounts, ranging from official inquiries to full-fledged histories, the episode evolves from a preventive strike into a malicious and bloody massacre. Early reports illustrate the contentious politics of the conquest that brought the event to light but also obscured its details. Nevertheless, the histories by Francisco López de Gómara and Bernal Díaz del Castillo categorically indicted Pedro de Alvarado. In the works of Bernardino de Sahagún and Diego Durán, echoes of first-crusade historiography in the gruesome depiction of the assault complicate their identification as bearers of an indigenous perspective.

Preemptive Strikes—Israel and Iran

This essay looks at the contemporary just war theory literature on preventive war that has emerged largely in reaction to the US invasion of Iraq. Recent sanctions on Iran and the debate over its nuclear program now suggest the usefulness of a forward looking perspective on preventive strikes, rather than the retroactive analyses offered thus far primarily with reference to Iraq. With Iran closely in mind, I address the various arguments for and against preventive war indicating throughout that the various principled objections to early military action can be overcome in this case. Many of the crucial concrete questions regarding costs and benefits need to be settled in practice, rather than in the realm of political theory. Ultimately, the discussion suggests that Iran is a legitimate candidate for early military action aimed to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. I argue that in principle, subject to credible intelligence information and requirements of proportionality, a unilateral Israeli strike against Iran will be justifiable, both morally and legally, as self-defense.

Preventive Strikes: Women, Precancer, and Prophylactic Surgery (review)

Preventive Strikes: Women, Precancer, and Prophylactic Surgery (review)

Preventive Strikes: Women, Precancer, and Prophylactic Surgery Ilana Löwy

Preventive Strikes: Women, Precancer, and Prophylactic Surgery Ilana Löwy