Sacrificial causalities of nuclear weapons: Takashi Nagai and Albert Wohlstetter

2021 ◽  
pp. 175508822110448
Author(s):  
William E DeMars
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Northeast Asia ◽  
Rand Corporation ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
Important Study ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The U.S

After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945, both nations experienced a profound need for a new and encompassing story of what it meant to be Japanese, and to be American, in the permanent nuclear age. This article is a thought experiment to juxtapose the writings and personas of two people who helped their respective societies answer those needs and questions during the early Cold War: Takashi Nagai—medical radiologist, and survivor of the American atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and Albert Wohlstetter—leading American civilian nuclear strategist for the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. Using a combination of mythopeic analysis, biography and illuminative juxtaposition, the study discovers surprising similarities and analogies between the two cases. They each enact and propose interesting variations of sacrificial causalities—claims that human nuclear sacrifices past or promised can bring peace by deterrence now or peace by abolition soon enough. This is an important study now, as both Japan’s nuclear pacifism and the American nuclear umbrella in Northeast Asia are coming under more severe questioning than perhaps ever before.

Deconstructing the bomb: recent perspectives on nuclear history

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. HUGHES
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Manhattan Project ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Nuclear History ◽  
The Cold War

John Canaday,The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Pp. xviii+310. ISBN 0-299-16854-9. £19.50.Septimus H. Paul,Nuclear Rivals: Anglo-American Atomic Relations 1941–1952. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Pp. ix+266. ISBN 0-8142-0852-5. £31.95.Peter Bacon Hales,Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Pp. 448. ISBN 0-252-02296-3. £22.00.A decade after the end of the Cold War, the culture and technology of nuclear weapons had lost much of the overt sense of dread they once inspired. The decline in international tension following the end of the communist regimes of the Soviet bloc produced a massive shift in the ideology of the nuclear in the 1990s. The de-targeting and dismantling of large numbers of nuclear weapons and the demise of the threat of nuclear annihilation created new conditions both for international security and for the writing of nuclear history. With the declassification and release of large quantities of official documentation from the former adversaries, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1995, a burst of histories of various aspects of the nuclear age have appeared over the last ten years, exploring not just the technopolitics, strategy and operational logistics of the Cold War and the arms race, but the cultural history of the nuclear age, its imagery, its architecture, its oppositional politics and its effects on the landscape, national and regional economies and cultures and indeed everyday life. At a time of global economic and political uncertainty and the emergent threat of capricious international terrorism and new nuclear proliferation, the apparent certainties of the Cold War now even evoke a certain nostalgia, and its artefacts and structures are being recast as ‘heritage’.

Inventory Control of Dual-Use Equipment

1995 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Franz
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Biological Weapons ◽  
Dual Use ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Biological Weapons Convention ◽  
The U.S

Proliferation of biological—as well as chemical and nuclear—weapons is a threat to the security of the U.S. in the post-Cold War era. The number of states with biological weapons (BW) programs or with a strong interest in having a BW program has increased significantly since the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) was signed in 1972 (Office of Technology Assessment, 1993). BW programs present difficult intelligence targets. Thus, the Soviet Union was a signatory to the BWC at the time of the Sverdlovsk incident in 1979, yet we knew little of the scope of its BW program until 1991 (Meselson et al., 1994). The spread of biotechnology throughout the world in recent years has made even more governments potentially BW capable.

Nuclear Weapons & Nuclear Use

Daedalus ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 145 (4) ◽  
pp. 50-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Robert Kehler
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Deterrence ◽  
Complete Elimination ◽  
Global Security ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Nuclear Arsenal ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

While nuclear weapons were conceived to end a war, in the aftermath of their operational use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they became the central (and controversial) means to prevent a war. Nuclear deterrence formed the foundation of U.S. Cold War doctrine and the basis of an extended security guarantee to our allies. But the Cold War ended one-quarter century ago, and questions about the efficacy of deterrence, the need for nuclear weapons, and the ethics surrounding them have resurfaced as some call for further major reductions in inventory or the complete elimination of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Discussed from the perspective of a military practitioner, this essay highlights the continuing need for U.S. nuclear weapons in a global security environment that is highly complex and uncertain, and describes the means by which the credibility of the nuclear portion of the strategic deterrent is being preserved even as the role and prominence of these weapons have been reduced.

5. Nuclear deterrence and arms control

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siracusa
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
Military Strategy ◽  
Nuclear Deterrence ◽  
Good Luck ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
Nuclear Stability

The nuclear revolution, it is argued, caused an era of relative peace. Not all agree. Some suggest that nuclear weapons were actually irrelevant to keeping the peace because a world war had become too costly. ‘Nuclear deterrence and arms control’ considers both sides of the argument. Not until the second decade of the nuclear age was the danger of nuclear weaponry and the perception of this danger enough to give impetus to the concept of deterrence and cause a Cold War stalemate. Deterrence did not emerge as a military strategy, it was just a political reality. Nuclear stability prevailed due to good luck and mutual prudence.

History, Ideology, and Human Rights

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-176
Author(s):  
Anthony DiFilippo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Northeast Asia ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Korean ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Rights Issues

This article will analyze the connection between history, countervailing ideologies, that is, the legacy of the Cold War, and the perceived identification of human rights violations as they pertain to countries with major security interests in Northeast Asia. This article will further show that the enduring nuclear-weapons problem in North Korea has been inextricably linked to human rights issues there, specifically because Washington wants to change the behavior of officials in Pyongyang so that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) becomes a state that at least remotely resembles a liberal democracy. Although supported by much of the international community, including the United States' South Korean and Japanese allies in Northeast Asia, Washington's North Korean policy has remained ineffective, as Pyongyang has continued to perform missile testing and still possesses nuclear weapons.

12. The Second Nuclear Age: Nuclear Weapons in the Twenty-First Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 202-219
Author(s):  
C. Dale Walton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Strategic Culture ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines the role played by nuclear weapons in international politics during and after the cold war, making a distinction between the First Nuclear Age and the ongoing Second Nuclear Age. After providing a background on the First Nuclear Age, the chapter considers the various risks present in the Second Nuclear Age, focusing on issues related to nuclear deterrence, nuclear proliferation networks, strategic culture, and ballistic missile defences. It then discusses the assumption that arms control and disarmament treaties are the best means to further counterproliferation efforts. It also assesses the future of nuclear weapons and whether the world is facing a Third Nuclear Age before concluding with an analysis of the relevance of deterrence in the face of changing political and technological circumstances.

The United States, Tibet, and the Cold War

2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 145-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melvyn C. Goldstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Financial Aid ◽  
The United States ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Over Time

This article examines U.S. policy toward Tibet from the end of the 1940s to the end of the 1980s, especially the 1950s and 1960s. U.S. policy during this period operated on two levels. At the strategic level, the United States consistently supported China's claim of sovereignty over Tibet. But at the tactical level, U.S. policy varied a great deal over time, ranging from the provision of military and financial aid to Tibetan guerrilla forces in the 1950s and 1960s to the almost complete lack of official attention to Tibet in the 1970s and early 1980s. The article explains why the U.S. government has never accepted Tibet's claim to independence and why the question of Tibet, after falling into obscurity in the 1970s, reemerged on the U.S. agenda in the mid- to late 1980s. The article highlights the cynicism that has often characterized tactical shifts in U.S. policy.

scholarly journals Nuclear weapons, extinction, and the Anthropocene: Reappraising Jonathan Schell

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Rens van Munster ◽  
Casper Sylvest
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Nuclear Environment ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Do So

Abstract In the Anthropocene, International Relations must confront the possibility of anthropogenic extinction. Recent, insightful attempts to advance new vocabularies of planet politics tend to demote the profound historical and intellectual links between our current predicament and the nuclear age. In contrast, we argue that it is vital to revisit the nuclear-environment nexus of the Cold War to trace genealogies of today's intricate constellation of security problems. We do so by reappraising the work of Jonathan Schell (1943–2014), author of The Fate of the Earth (1982), who came to regard extinction as a defining feature of the nuclear age. We show how a deep engagement with nuclear weapons led Schell to an understanding of the Earth as a complex, delicate ecology and fed into a sophisticated, Arendtian theory of extinction. Despite its limitations and tensions, we argue that Schell's work remains deeply relevant for rethinking human–Earth relations and confronting the Anthropocene.

The Evolution of American Civil Defense Film Rhetoric

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 93-121
Author(s):  
Arnold Ringstad
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Civil Defense ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The U.S

In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. government oversaw the production of civil defense films designed to educate the population about what to do in the event of nuclear war. This article uses films from two distinct periods—the early 1950s and the early 1960s—as a point of departure for discussing U.S. civil defense policies during the Cold War. The article traces four key shifts in the film program's rhetorical strategies. First, an early focus on ideological matters was replaced with an emphasis on practical steps citizens could take. Second, the early conventionalizing of nuclear dangers was replaced by a more subtle integration of those dangers into everyday life. Third, the early films' narrative structures were replaced by a straightforward, documentary-style approach. Finally, the early flippancy with which nuclear war was treated was replaced by a deadly seriousness. These rhetorical shifts indicate that the civil defense establishment was capable of reacting to scientific, political, and popular pressures.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document