Thousands Of Nuclear Weapons Research Articles

Opening Up Arms Control Silos

Over the years, countless undergraduate students in survey courses and special subjects have been lectured about U.S. President Richard Nixon’s May 1972 visit to Moscow, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty’s (ABMT) signing, and the agreement that concluded the first round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). Images of Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev putting pen to paper in the Kremlin’s grand St. Vladimir Hall will be familiar to hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of students who have studied U.S. and Soviet foreign policy, the Cold War, and the arms race. Yet, this outward appearance of amity and compromise between leaders with their metaphorical fingers on the metaphorical buttons of thousands of nuclear weapons belies the lengthy and, at times, vicious bureaucratic infighting that plagued the SALT and ABMT negotiations. It is this very bureaucratic complexity that the late Patrick J. Garrity (who sadly passed away on May 10, 2021) and Erin R. Mahan seek to address in Averting Doomsday: Arms Control During the Nixon Presidency. Not only do they concern themselves with personal and institutional factors that influenced Nixon’s arms control agenda policies, but they also make a welcome effort to encompass the entirety of arms control. This ambitious aim brings together an assessment not just of strategic nuclear issues, but also of nuclear non-proliferation, nuclear testing, chemical weapons control, and biological weapons control. These areas are frequently left in silos—pun apologetically intended—and treated as distinct issues. Garrity and Mahan are therefore to be praised for such a comprehensive approach.

A Framework for Assessing Nuclear Terrorism Threats in Bangladesh

We live in a world where thousands of nuclear weapons exist. Many countries and even terrorist organizations want to acquire nuclear weapons. The ambiguous and transnational nature of terrorist organizations challenges the national security of many states. Bangladesh is a small and densely populated country with a nuclear energy plant. Although Bangladesh has a nuclear energy policy, it has no atomic security policy or legal framework. The dearth of military capabilities, administrative facilities, and human resources with proper skills and experiences makes Bangladesh vulnerable to nuclear terrorist attacks. This research aims to build a framework that would be useful in assessing the security threats from the likelihood of nuclear terrorism in a country like Bangladesh. This nuclear security assessment framework could be useful in assessing security threats from nuclear terrorism in non-nuclear-weapon countries.

Consequences absent from bomb assessment

An air of unreality overcame me as I read David Kramer’s article about evaluation of new nuclear bomb technologies (Physics Today, February 2020, page 23). The only concern mentioned is whether the physics of the new test facility will adequately ensure the reliability of the new designs without actual explosive tests being carried out. It’s a neutral, objective presentation of some interesting physics.But if ever those warheads were actually used, whether in error or in anger, Physics Today and most or all of its readers would cease to exist. Presumably, about 25% of US residents would be fortunate enough to be vaporized instantly. Maybe another 25% would die in the next week from injuries and radiation sickness. And would any survive the ensuing nuclear winter without public supplies of electricity, fuel, food, and medicine? Russia’s people would suffer the same, assuming they were hit in full retaliation by those well-designed US bombs. And what about the rest of the world? Could all memory of Physics Today be wiped out along with humankind’s accumulated knowledge of physics?I suggest that Physics Today follow up by publishing a neutral, objective, physics-based analysis of the consequences of full-scale nuclear war. It might, of course, raise the question, Why exactly do the world’s “great powers” need to have thousands of nuclear weapons? Section:ChooseTop of page <<© 2020 American Institute of Physics.

The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History by Petra Goedde

Reviewed by: The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History by Petra Goedde Martijn Lak The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History. By petra goedde. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 307 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-537083-6. $35.00 (hardcover and ebook). The historiography of the Cold War has predominantly focused on war, or the lack thereof between the two superpowers. One of the main points of focus is the in all ways absurd nuclear arms race, which resulted in the United States and the Soviet Union (SU) combined having tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. For decades, people lived in the shadow of "the bomb," fearing that even a small mistake or the action of some lunatic general might result in nuclear Armageddon, so vividly portrayed in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. However, the Cold War was also very much about preserving peace, perhaps especially in the realization that an all-out war between the United States and Soviet Union would mean the destruction of civilization. It is precisely the emerging politics of peace that is central to Petra Goedde's thought-provoking The Politics of Peace. A Global Cold War History. As stated by the author: "The history of the Cold War cannot be written without an understanding of the competing definitions of peace that existed on both sides of the Iron Curtain […] The Cold War was both more ubiquitous and less territorial than previously assumed" (p. 4). Using an impressive and very broad range of primary sources, Goedde does an excellent job in showing how the politics of peace were used by the various actors in the Cold War. At first, the United States rejected peace as a public strategy, in contrast to the SU. For Moscow, the promotion of peace was an integral part of its propaganda campaign. Washington and its European allies, on the other hand, "regularly accused activists of being communist agents or naïve idealists who had become tools of an international conspiracy […] By associating peace with communism, the Western world was left aligning its own liberal democratic capitalist system with war" (p. 13). This would only change at the beginning of the 1950s, as the Americans began to understand that dismissing peace advocacy damaged the United States' international reputation. This was articulated, for example, by W. Averell Harriman, special assistant to President Truman and former ambassador in Moscow, who stated that "it is essential for this government to recapture the peace mantle from the Russians." In the words of Goedde: "Over the course of the 1950s, Harriman's advice became US policy" (p. 23). [End Page 828] Writing in an accessible style, Goedde presents a plethora of organizations and people, both East and West, that advocated peace. She also makes very clear that "the left," traditionally associated more with peace than "the right," by no means presented a united front. There was a strong division between what Goedde refers to as the "Old Left" and the "New Left." The latter, "disillusioned with the empty rhetoric and internal contradictions of Soviet-dominated communism […] developed an alternative political agenda that championed peace, freedom from oppression, nonviolence, and participatory democracy" (p. 39). A united left proved largely illusory. Goedde also shows that there was considerable difference in the women's movement. Traditionally, war and national security were associated with masculinity and strength. Peace was seen as weak and feminine. However, "it did not follow logically that men advocated for the former while women sought the latter" (p. 131). Goedde also makes convincingly clear that women had considerable influence on the course of the Cold War, at least on lowering tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. This became clear, for example, in the Détente of the 1960s and 1970s, although it is a fact that the thaw in international relations had a number of causes: "Détente should be understood as a gradual process that unfolded over the course of the 1960s, emanating from multiple sources and shaped by a diverse set of actors" (p. 189). Chief among them were, Goedde points out convincingly, the growing peace and anti-war movements, above all in the United States...

Truth, Illumination, and Nuclear Weapons

Truth, Illumination, and Nuclear Weapons

World on fire: two scenarios of the destruction of human civilization and possible extinction of the human race

This paper examines the foundation for two scenarios of the future depicting how human civilization might destroy itself and possibly bring about the extinction of the human race in the process. The scenarios are based upon the two human-generated “fires” deeply ingrained within industrial civilization: (1) the nuclear “fire” of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and their automated “launch on warning” alert systems and (2) the slow burning “fire” of global warming and runaway climate change. This paper also examines obstacles that are currently preventing the necessary first steps towards solving these problems.

Learning from Contingency

World War I was the dominant event of the 20th century. It hastened the ascendancy of the United States as the world's leading economic power, led to the breakup of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires, and set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately lead to the end of the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires. It nearly wiped out a generation of young men and killed millions of civilians made vulnerable to influenza and other pathogens by the ravages of war, dislocation, ethnic cleansing, and the allied blockade. It triggered a revolution in Russia that echoed in eastern and central Europe with a lasting resonance in China and southeast Asia. Collectively, these developments made it almost impossible to restore political and economic stability to Europe, paving the way for Hitler's rise to power, the Holocaust, and a second and far deadlier bid for hegemony by Germany, Italy, and Japan. World War II in turn gave rise to a Cold War between the Soviet bloc and the west that kept Europe divided for 50 years and the target of thousands of nuclear weapons that, at the push of a button, could have turned the continent into a desolate, uninhabitable wasteland.World War I and the events that followed in its wake had equally profound cultural and intellectual consequences. Europe's self-confidence disappeared with its leading role in the giving rise or prominence to forms of artistic expression that communicated defiance, doubt, confusion, and alienation, and many artists and intellectuals sought refuge in a highly idealized image of Soviet-style socialism. Europe's internecine struggles and exhaustion after World War II accelerated the hegemonic rise of the United States. It became the leader of the self-proclaimed free world, helped finance the reconstruction of western Europe and Japan, imposed its political and economic institutions and practices wherever it could, and gained influence in a wider circle of states through aid, trade, and investment. Investment at home in education and research, private support for the arts, and enrichment by thousands of Europe's leading scientists, artists, and intellectuals made the US the world's leader in medicine, science, space exploration, and the performing arts. American popular culture became global in its appeal, leading some intellectuals to worry about Hollywood's hegemony and debasement of real culture and others to celebrate it as a soft resource.1Many historians and international relations scholars accept these outcomes as determined. The conventional wisdom among historians is that Europe in 1914 was like dry kindling waiting for a match, and international relations scholars have developed theories about power transition and offensive dominance to explain why this was so. World War II appears at least as inevitable to many scholars, given German dissatisfaction with the treaty of Versailles and the risk-taking propensity of Hitler, Mussolini, and Japanese leaders. Equally inevitable was the Cold War, considering the power vacuum in the heart of Europe at the end of World War 11 and the antagonistic social systems of the two victorious superpowers. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the emergence ofthe US as a unipole appear just as inevitable to some observers. Students of the former Soviet Union, liberal theorists, and proponents of globalization provide numerous reasons why Soviet-style communism was doomed and American-style capitalist democracy the wave of the future.The view that our world is the world that had to be, or at least the most likely of worlds, has multiple and reinforcing causes. There is the hindsight bias, by which we upgrade the probability of events once they have occurred and generally tend to regard the past as overdetermined but the future as much more contingent.2 The hindsight bias is reinforced by the very nature of the scholarly enterprise. Historians and social scientists make reputations for themselves by proposing new explanations or theories to account for major events like the fall of the Roman empire, the industrial and French revolutions, the World Wars and the Cold War. …

Hoping for the Best, preparing for the worst: China's response to US hegemony

In the post-Cold War strategic environment, Beijing could plausibly have opted for Soviet-style geostrategic competition with Washington, but it has not. Chinese leaders have not thus far, and almost certainly will never, amass thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert or deploy significant forces to a network of bases spanning the globe. Nevertheless, the below assessment of China's increasing hard and soft power yields the conclusion that a Chinese challenge to US hegemony cannot be ruled out. The United States must prudently maintain military forces appropriate to facing a potential peer competitor. At the same time, however, Washington must engage in a process of creative diplomacy that simultaneously matches China's soft power and engages seriously with Beijing to create areas of consensus and cooperation.

Russian Roulette

Leonid Smirnov lives with his wife Natasha in the Moscow suburb of Podolsk where he once worked as a foreman at the Luch Scientific Production Association. Throughout the Cold War, the Luch site was used by the Soviets as a research and development facility for nuclear reactors. On the nondescript campus, Smirnov was tasked with measuring and dispensing highly enriched uranium (HEU)-the seed material for nuclear weapons-to the teams of researchers exploring massive space-based power generation capabilities for orbiting military satellites.' For decades, life as an employee of the massive Soviet nuclear infrastructure was generally one of great privilege, but by 1992, the first year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, life for this once sacrosanct community of scientists, engineers, and technicians was irrevocably altered. Tens of thousands lost their jobs or went months without a paycheque. Even the brightest scientists and engineers were forced to seek work where they could get it-whether driving taxi cabs or selling their nefarious talents to foreign governments.2 Inflation was rampant. The decontrol of most prices in January of 1992 prompted an average price increase of 245 percent in that month alone, and by the end of that year, retail prices had increased by 2520 percent. The cost of consumer goods became, for many, untenable. In 1990, a loaf of bread cost 0.14 roubles; a year later, the price had jumped to 1.40 roubles. By 1992, the price had soared to seven roubles. For the average Russian worker providing for his or her family, price increases of up to 5000 percent on basic goods at best meant financial ruin.3Faced with these dire economic conditions, and knowing that the scales at the Luch plant were not sophisticated enough to detect minute deviations from previously recorded weights, each day Smirnov began filling vials with small quantities of HEU and smuggling the material out of the facility. As plant accounting records continued to show no changes at all to the overall stockpile of bomb-grade HEU, Smirnov ultimately succeeded in squirreling away 70 grams of material without detection-enough to give a would-be terrorist a head start toward building a crude nuclear weapon.4SUPPLY AND DEMANDIn December 1991, the hammer and sickle, the symbol of Soviet dominion, was lowered from atop the Kremlin for the last time. As the world celebrated the end of the Cold War, a less palpable but no less sinister threat emerged in place of overt hostilities. This heretofore unimagined international security challenge was based not upon Soviet strength, but upon Russian weakness. For 40 years, the Soviet Union safely operated many tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, experimented with hundreds of deadly pathogenic cocktails, and stockpiled tons of chemical munitions. Management of this massive weapons complex occurred within the context of a dosed society with redundant security measures that prevented incursion of the complex by the outside world. The omnipresence of the KGB and the threat of harsh penalties made clandestine behaviour among insiders unlikely.But by the early 1990s, Russia and its former Soviet neighbours were left to deal with the legacy of a massive nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons program with a vastly diminished resource base. As the Russian economy crashed, the temptation to surreptitiously divert materials from within for profit, as exemplified by Smirnov, led to new fears of an incipient nuclear, biological, and chemical black market in the former Soviet Union (FSU). From hundreds of excess strategic and tactical nuclear warheads and dozens of decaying nuclear submarines, to radioactive lakes and tens of thousands of unemployed nuclear and biological weapons scientists, the strain placed upon the fragile new governments of the FSU by virtue of their nuclear inheritance alone was overwhelming. Security measures designed to keep foreigners out were now inadequate as knowledge, materials, and weapons became instantly marketable products to terrorists and terrorist states. …

Cooperation to Secure Nuclear Stockpiles: A Case of Constrained Innovation

thousands of nuclear weapons, and enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) and separated plutonium to make tens of thousands more, out of hostile hands. In this crisis, small groups of policy entrepreneurs launched major innovations to spur the nuclear complexes of the former rival superpowers to pursue their common interest in securing and dismantling nuclear stockpiles. Billions of dollars have now been spent pursuing these efforts, thousands of bombs’ worth of nuclear materials have been permanently destroyed, and security both for thousands of nuclear weapons and for enough nuclear material for tens of thousands more has been substantially improved. But as the Soviet collapse has receded into the past, the initial innovations have been increasingly constrained by cautious bureaucracies, continuing secrecy and mistrust, and festering political obstacles and disputes. Programs once conceived as free-wheeling, short-term crisis responses have shifted toward “business as usual” approaches—more systematized and sustainable, but far slower and less flexible. Yet the danger remains very real. Al Qaida and the jihadist network it helped to spawn have repeatedly attempted to purchase stolen nuclear material and to recruit nuclear expertise; indeed, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri met at length with two senior Pakistani nuclear scientists to discuss nuclear weapons. Government studies have repeatedly concluded that a technically capable terrorist group could plausibly make at least a crude nuclear bomb if it procures HEU or separated plutonium. The essential ingredients of nuclear weapons are stored in hundreds of buildings in more than 40 countries—some very well secured, and some with little more than a night watchman and a chain-link fence. The danger of nuclear theft is Matthew Bunn

Dealing With ‘Rogue’ States: Cooperation versus Coercion?

ASIANPERSPECTIVE, Vol. 23, No. 1,1999, pp. 205-214 Book Review Dealing With 'Rogue' States: Cooperation versus Coercion? Leon Sigal, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy With North Korea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) When India and Pakistan's indulged in their bouts of nucle­ ar machismo last year the US response was wholly predictable. Mandatory sanctions were immediately imposed on both states. While this may have made some American members of Congress feel better and conceivably may have deterred other states contemplating going nuclear, the sanctions were an exer­ cise in futility as far as India and Pakistan were concerned. Both states had successfully tested their nuclear weapons and neither planned more explosions. Sanctions - and the hostile American rhetoric that accompanied their imposition - only served to increase popular support for the nuclear programs in both Pak­ istan and India. To many outsiders America's indignation seemed both inconsistent and self-serving. Washington was simultaneously claiming that the handful bombs in South Asian hands were a deadly threat to regional and global stability, while the many thousands of nuclear weapons in American hands were a force for world peace. Critics argued that at best this was gross hypocrisy; at worst racism. Leon Sigal's engaging study, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy With North Korea, says nothing about India or Pak­ istan, yet there are uncanny parallels between the Korean and South Asian nuclear dramas. In each case American inattention and misperception made effective diplomacy difficult if not impossible in the early stages. In each case Washington signally 206 AndrewMack failed to see how its self-righteous rhetoric and blustering served only to infuriate the hyper-nationalist regimes it sought to coerce. In both cases US responses to the crisis were driven by domestic politics in ways which seriously impeded attempts at crisis resolution. The Korean case was also very different, of course. India was a democracy of sorts, Pakistan was an erstwhile American ally; North Korea was a totalitarian enemy. The mainstream conventional wisdom in the US security community in the early 1990s depicted the North as a ruthless, aggressive and irrational 'rogue' state implacably hostile to the US, bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, and willing to cheat on its international obli­ gations to do so. Sigal, by contrast, sees a weak, somewhat para­ noid North Korea, prickly and difficult to deal with to be sure, but prepared to reach an accommodation with Washington and to abandon its nuclear weapons program in return for a package of diplomatic and economic concessions. American security mindsets meant that Pyongyang's signals of willingness to cooperate were either ignored or seen as tricks, while North Korean bluster and threats confirmed Pyongyang's 'rogue' image in American eyes. This in turn dictated what Sigal calls the 'crime and punishment' strategy that Washington used to coerce Pyongyang into giving up its bomb program. 'Rogues' who ruled by terror at home and promoted it abroad were, by definition almost, were simply not amenable to rational persua­ sion; only coercion. In dealing with Pyongyang, denial of high level political contacts and economic assistance, threats of sanctions and even military strikes against the North's nuclear facilities, were the favoured weapons in Washington's diplomatic armoury. Posi­ tive inducements were relegated to the sidelines. The problem was that the coercion approach simply didn't work. By the summer of 1994 a combination of US impatience and North Korean intransigence had brought the Korean penin­ sula to the very brink of war. The antecedents of the crisis went back at least to 1985 when the North started to build a small research reactor at its nuclear facility in Yongbyon. There was nothing particularly suspicious about this. Many countries start their civilian nuclear programs by building research reactors to get practical experience in non­ Dealing With 'Rogue'States 207 military nuclear technologies. The fact that Pyongyang had joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985 was also reassuring. In joining the NPT, the North had undertaken not to make nuclear weapons and had also agreed to admit International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to monitor its nuclear facilities. The main task of the safeguards' inspectors was to ensure that no plutonium - the...

MANAGING MILITARY URANIUM AND PLUTONIUM IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE FORMER SOVIET UNION

▪ Abstract Effective approaches to the management of plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU)—the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons—are fundamental to controlling nuclear proliferation and providing the basis for deep, transparent, and irreversible reductions in nuclear weapons stockpiles. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the ongoing dismantlement of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons are creating unprecedented stresses on the systems for managing these materials, as well as unprecedented opportunities for cooperation to improve these systems. In this article, we summarize the technical background to this situation, and the current and prospective security challenges posed by military stockpiles of these materials in the United States and Russia. We then review the programs in place to address these challenges, the progress of these programs to date, and the work remaining to be done, in five areas: (a) preventing theft and smuggling of nuclear warheads and fissile materials; (b) building a regime of monitored reductions in nuclear warhead and fissile material stockpiles; (c) ending further production of excess fissile materials; (d ) reducing stockpiles of excess fissile materials; and (e) avoiding economic collapse in the nuclear cities where substantial fractions of these materials and their guardians reside.

Fissile Material Security in the Post-Cold-War World

During the cold war, the US and the Soviet Union each produced enough fissile material to make tens of thousands of nuclear weapons—between 100 and 200 metric tons of plutonium and about 1000 tonnes of highly enriched uranium (uranium enriched to more than 20% in U-235). This weapons-usable fissile material seemed invulnerable to theft until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, subkilogram quantities of plutonium and multikilogram quantities of highly-enriched uranium have been intercepted in Russia, the Czech Republic and Germany—apparently stolen from Russian nuclear facilities and intended for sale. the old Soviet security system for fissile material, which focused on the surveillance and control of those in contact with such material, has been largely swept away. Gone too is the economic security of nuclear workers, who may now be tempted or threatened by predatory criminal groups. the situation poses a grave risk to global security, because the biggest obstacle facing non-nuclear-weapons states or even terrorist groups interested in acquiring nuclear weapons is lack of access to the bomb material.

Nuclear weapons and the former Soviet republics

The collapse of the Soviet Union has heightened alarm over the fate of the thousands of nuclear weapons deployed across its former territories. The worry is that the new states' pledges to disarm may be overturned and central control weakened by economic hardship and the likely conflict between the new nations. But the political changes also bring great opportunities. William Walker writes that there is now the chance to de-nuclearize much of Eurasia and to achieve deep cuts in the US and Russian arsenals. The Soviet Union's demise has shown that economic development not the possession of nuclear weapons is the main guarantor of the security of states.

New Soviet Thinking and U.S. Nuclear Policy, by David B. Myers

This book is an examination of nuclear weapons policy options in light of recent declared changes in Soviet military strategy. David B. Myers addresses the question: How should the United States respond to the fact that the Soviet Union has thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at the American homeland? He points out that even if a Soviet-American treaty cutting strategic weapons by fifty percent becomes a reality, this question will remain compelling. Given the current climate of glasnost, US. strategy now must carefully be rethought. Myers' discussion provides an explanation of essential policy alternatives, the major arguments for each, and criteria for evaluating all proposals. In an effort to make the security options more accessible to readers, Myers draws an original analogy between four criminal correction theories and four major policy options.Nuclear deterrence strategy is compared to the theory of criminal deterrence; strategic defense, to social defense; conventional defense, to retribution; and civilian-based defense, to rehabilitation. He evaluates each policy by means of seven criteria: coherence, moral defensibility, legal defensibility, technical feasibility, affordability, adequacy vis-a-vis Soviet policy, and value for disaster avoidance. This work in applied philosophy clearly provides readers specialists as well as generalists with technical information, policy alternatives, and criteria to evaluate competing answers to one of the most crucial questions facing our nation. David B. Myers, Professor of Philosophy at Moorhead State University, is the author of Between Marx and Nietzsche.

Improving Communications Links between Moscow and Washington

The Direct Communications Link (DCL) between Moscow and Washington, established in 1963 and commonly known as the `hot-line', is supposed to provide a continuous communications link between US and Soviet National Command Authorities in both crises and war. This article describes the principal rationales for the DCL (crisis management, escalation control and war termination) and the facilities and systems which presently constitute the link. It argues that the present system has significant deficiencies in terms of survivability and endurance which make it unable to satisfy the requirements for escalation control and war termination, and it outlines possible measures for rectifying these deficiencies. These include a dedicated geostationary satellite communications system, with two satellites, both fixed and mobile satellite ground control stations, and optical fibre cable links for the ground connections, and with an adaptive high frequency (HF) radio circuit as a backup. The recent political developments in the Soviet Union and in the US-Soviet strategic relationship have dramatically reduced the likelihood of strategic confrontation. However, this is not a reason for inaction. Both the US and the Soviet Union intend to retain thousands of nuclear weapons, at least in the foreseeable future, and crises and confrontations between them cannot be ruled out altogether. Rather, these changed political circumstances provide an opportunity for cooperative efforts to dramatically improve the communications links between Moscow and Washington.

Electronics and the nuclear battlefield

Both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact have deployed thousands of nuclear weapons in European nations for use if war breaks out. Current NATO doctrine includes the use of nuclear weapons in the early stages of such a battle if NATO appears to be losing. Would the vast quantities of electronics deployed by the United States and its allies survive on such a battlefield?

Civil Defense: Listening to Chicken Little

The SALT II debate has revealed a growing acceptance among anti-SALT strategists that we must be prepared to fight a nuclear war. The "war fighters" advocate strategies and force levels that reflect the traditional belief that weapons exist to fight wars, not just deter them, and nuclear war is like any other in this respect. There is little recognition by this group that events leading up to a crossroads in human history— the firing of thousands of nuclear weapons— would be anything other than a neat, mechanical, step-by-step procession to confrontation, from which the two sides could easily disengage. Civil defense, programs are prescribed as an integral part of a credible war-fighting capability, and Protection in the Nuclear Age, the government's most recent public information film on the subject (produced for the Federal Emergency Management Agency), accepts this assumption.