Clinton Announces New Initiatives to Counter Emergent Terrorist Threats

1999 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-142

We are here to discuss emerging threats to America's security as we reach a new century. How do we respond to the threat of terrorists around the world, turning from bullets and bombs to even more insidious and potent weapons? What if they and the rogue states that sponsor them try to attack the critical computer systems that drive our society? What if they seek to use chemical, biological, even nuclear weapons? The United States must deal with these emerging threats now, so that the instruments of prevention develop at least as rapidly as the instruments of disruption.

Author(s):  
Joseph Cirincione

The American poet Robert Frost famously mused on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Nuclear weapons can deliver both. The fire is obvious: modern hydrogen bombs duplicate on the surface of the earth the enormous thermonuclear energies of the Sun, with catastrophic consequences. But it might be a nuclear cold that kills the planet. A nuclear war with as few as 100 hundred weapons exploded in urban cores could blanket the Earth in smoke, ushering in a years-long nuclear winter, with global droughts and massive crop failures. The nuclear age is now entering its seventh decade. For most of these years, citizens and officials lived with the constant fear that long-range bombers and ballistic missiles would bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. Fifty years ago, Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach, portrayed the terror of survivors as they awaited the radioactive clouds drifting to Australia from a northern hemisphere nuclear war. There were then some 7000 nuclear weapons in the world, with the United States outnumbering the Soviet Union 10 to 1. By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. ‘These bombs’, Schell wrote, ‘were built as “weapons” for “war”, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man’.


2017 ◽  
pp. 69-79
Author(s):  
Marcin Kowalczyk

The atomic bomb used in 1945 by the United States disturbed the military and symbolic balance of the world then. It became a sign of the Western power. The communist propaganda sought to neutralize the meaning of a new weapon. The text reconstructs the attempts of this neutralization and indicates the ways of presentation of nuclear weapons in the Polish poetry of socialist realism. Several motifs can be mentioned here: juxtaposition of the atomic bomb with apocalyptic motifs, highlighting the lack of intellectual and moral qualifications for possessing it, and emphasizing that it is a dangerous by-product of the Western desire for profit. Above all, however, the poetry of socialist realism underlined that Western culture is an incomprehensible and inhuman evil.


2003 ◽  
Vol 102 (668) ◽  
pp. 426-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasen J. Castillo

Although policy makers worry about the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, we should recognize that terrorist organizations have shown a remarkable tendency to fall back on well-tested conventional methods of attack. … Deterrence, when measured against prevention, still maintains enough credibility to prevent rogue states from sharing nuclear weapons with terrorists.


Author(s):  
Paul C. Avey

Why would countries without nuclear weapons even think about fighting nuclear-armed opponents? A simple answer is that no one believes nuclear weapons will be used. But that answer fails to consider why nonnuclear state leaders would believe that in the first place. This book argues that the costs and benefits of using nuclear weapons create openings that weak nonnuclear actors can exploit. It uses four case studies to show the key strategies available to nonnuclear states: Iraqi decision-making under Saddam Hussein in confrontations with the United States; Egyptian leaders' thinking about the Israeli nuclear arsenal during wars in 1969–70 and 1973; Chinese confrontations with the United States in 1950, 1954, and 1958; and a dispute that never escalated to war, the Soviet–United States tensions between 1946 and 1948 that culminated in the Berlin Blockade. Those strategies include limiting the scope of the conflict, holding chemical and biological weapons in reserve, seeking outside support, and leveraging international non-use norms. Counterintuitively, conventionally weak nonnuclear states are better positioned to pursue these strategies than strong ones, so that wars are unlikely when the nonnuclear state is powerful relative to its nuclear opponent. The book demonstrates clearly that nuclear weapons cast a definite but limited shadow, and while the world continues to face various nuclear challenges, understanding conflict in nuclear monopoly will remain a pressing concern for analysts and policymakers.


Author(s):  
A. E. Gotlieb

In the Latter Part of the last decade, when it began to become apparent that vehicles or devices carrying nuclear weapons could be made to enter into outer space and orbit around the earth's contours, both the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union began to put forward proposals for restricting or prohibiting such operations.The crucial year was 1957 — the year in which the Soviet Union launched its first sputnik in outer space. This scientific achievement, followed in 1961 by the advent of manned orbital satellites, made it apparent to the world at large and the lawyers among them that outer space could be utilized by man for his own purposes — and that these might not necessarily be peaceful ones.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-168
Author(s):  
V. Mizin ◽  

The article is devoted to the problems of ensuring strategic stability and the task of a comprehensive study of the current situation with strategic stability, developing new approaches to it, taking into account modern realities in the context of a crisis in the international situation, especially in relations between Russia and NATO, Russia and the United States. According to President Vladimir Putin, as a result, the system of strategic stability in the world continues to degrade. The main factors of this aggravation are analyzed. The task is to develop new foundations for strategic stability and assess its global parameters. The new concept of strategic stability can no longer be focused solely on the priority of preventing nuclear conflict between major nuclear powers, but must also take into account the totality of factors that determine the security situation in the realities of the modern world order. An analysis of the long-overdue systemic shift in world processes is arguably impossible without a fundamental re-evaluation of the entire perception of international security, and, above all, the concept of strategic stability, which is the theoretical basis of military policy and theoretical approaches to arms control. Academic community needs to develop a fundamentally innovative strategy for arms control in the new environment. Whether this will be a bilateral Russian-American format or a multilateral arrangement is a question that needs to be clarified in the course of diplomatic consultations. The required concept should obviously be both interdisciplinary (covering with various methodological tools a number of sciences such issues as strategic nuclear weapons, non-strategic nuclear systems, missile defense, "prompt global conventional strike", hypersonic, cyberwarfare, space, beam, drones and other "exotic" types of weapons), and multilateral (that is, it should take into account the nuclear forces and nuclear potential of "third" countries, and not just the two traditional rivals – Russia and the United States).Such a concept of strategic stability should thus be much more "holistic" and comprehensive, covering not only the military potential of the leading powers, but also taking into account their political relations and divergences, the imperative of providing restraint and preventing major conflicts in the modern world. As such, it involves a comprehensive study of the crisis realities in the international system, primarily in the Russia–NATO and Russia–US “dyads” interrelationship against the background of the emergence of new nuclear weapons stakeholders. Among other things, these factors in the global balance of power make it impossible to proceed to a nuclear-free world in the foreseeable future. In this regard, the author sets the task for the expert community to formulate certain concrete ways to implement new conceptual frameworks for assessing the global parameters of the world system's evolution, and to develop pragmatic initiatives that can be taken to improve overall stability and interaction between the United States, NATO, Russia, and other emerging global actors.


Author(s):  
Andrew Futter ◽  
Benjamin Zala

Abstract Three decades after what is widely referred to as the transition from a First to a Second Nuclear Age, the world stands on the cusp of a possible Third Nuclear Age where the way that we conceptualise the central dynamics of the nuclear game will change again. This paradigm shift is being driven by the growth and spread of non-nuclear technologies with strategic applications and by a shift in thinking about the sources of nuclear threats and how they should be addressed, primarily, but not solely, in the United States. Recent scholarship has rightly identified a new set of challenges posed by the development of strategic non-nuclear weaponry (SNNW). But the full implications of this transformation in policy, technology and thinking for the global nuclear order as a whole have so far been underexplored. To remedy this, we look further ahead to the ways in which current trends, if taken to their logical conclusion, have the capacity to usher in a new nuclear era. We argue that in the years ahead, SNNW will increasingly shape the nuclear order, particularly in relation to questions of stability and risk. In the Third Nuclear Age, nuclear deployments, postures, balances, arms control, non-proliferation policy, and the prospects for disarmament, will all be shaped as much by developments in SNNW capabilities as by nuclear weapons. Consequently, we advocate for an urgent reassessment of the way nuclear order and nuclear risks are conceptualised as we confront the challenges of a Third Nuclear Age.


2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 186-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malini Ratnasingam ◽  
Lee Ellis

Background. Nearly all of the research on sex differences in mass media utilization has been based on samples from the United States and a few other Western countries. Aim. The present study examines sex differences in mass media utilization in four Asian countries (Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and Singapore). Methods. College students self-reported the frequency with which they accessed the following five mass media outlets: television dramas, televised news and documentaries, music, newspapers and magazines, and the Internet. Results. Two significant sex differences were found when participants from the four countries were considered as a whole: Women watched television dramas more than did men; and in Japan, female students listened to music more than did their male counterparts. Limitations. A wider array of mass media outlets could have been explored. Conclusions. Findings were largely consistent with results from studies conducted elsewhere in the world, particularly regarding sex differences in television drama viewing. A neurohormonal evolutionary explanation is offered for the basic findings.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 32-54
Author(s):  
Silvia Spitta

Sandra Ramos (b. 1969) is one of the few artists to reflect critically on both sides of the Cuban di-lemma, fully embodying the etymological origins of the word in ancient Greek: di-, meaning twice, and lemma, denoting a form of argument involving a choice between equally unfavorable alternatives. Throughout her works she shines a light on the dilemmas faced by Cubans whether in Cuba or the United States, underlining the bad personal and political choices people face in both countries. During the hard 1990s, while still in Havana, the artist focused on the traumatic one-way journey into exile by thousands, as well as the experience of profound abandonment experienced by those who were left behind on the island. Today she lives in Miami and operates a studio there as well as one in Havana. Her initial disorientation in the USA has morphed into an acerbic representation and critique of the current administration and a deep concern with the environmental collapse we face. A buffoonlike Trumpito has joined el Bobo de Abela and Liborio in her gallery of comic characters derived from the rich Cuban graphic arts tradition where she was formed. While Cuba is now represented as a rotten cake with menacing flies hovering over it ready to pounce, a bombastic Trumpito marches across the world stage, trampling everything underfoot, a dollar sign for a face.


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