Tilting Toward Thanatos: America's “Countervailing” Nuclear Strategy

1981 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis René Beres
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Alternative Strategy ◽  
Current Policy ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Comprehensive Test ◽  
The Right ◽  
Test Ban

America's current nuclear strategy seeks to improve deterrence with a counterforce targeting plan that exceeds the requirements of mutual assured destruction. This “countervailing” nuclear strategy codifies an enlarged spectrum of retaliatory options. The author argues, however, that the countervailing strategy is based upon a number of implausible and contradictory assumptions, and that it actually degrades the overriding objective of genuine security. For many reasons, the Soviet Union is not apt to assign a higher probability of fulfillment to American counterforce threats; under certain conditions, current policy confronts our adversary with a heightened incentive to pre-empt. The conclusion identifies an alternative strategy for the avoidance of nuclear war, a network of doctrines and obligations that calls for a return to minimum deterrence, a comprehensive test ban, and a joint renunciation of the right to the first use of nuclear weapons.

Rational Superiority, Crises, and Arms Control, 1961–1963

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Cameron
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
National Security ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Rhetoric ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Test Ban

Chapter 1 describes how John F. Kennedy rose to power by articulating his own new nuclear strategy, which would use the latest advances in social and organizational sciences, combined with US superiority in nuclear weapons, to defend the United States’ national security interests. The foremost exponent of this strategy of “rational superiority” was Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. The chapter then explains how this scheme was dealt a series of blows by Kennedy’s experiences during the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, which disabused him of the idea that nuclear superiority could be used to coerce the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the Kennedy administration used the rhetoric of rational superiority to advance the Limited Test Ban Treaty and was planning to employ it as part of the president’s reelection campaign in 1964. Kennedy had not reconciled this gap between his public rhetoric and personal doubts at the time of his death.

The continuing threat of nuclear war

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Cirincione
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Winter

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’.

Communist China's Attitude Towards Nuclear Tests

1965 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 96-107
Author(s):  
Hungdah Chiu
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Western China ◽  
Technical Data ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Communist China ◽  
Test Ban

On October 15, 1957, Communist China and the Soviet Union signed an agreement on new defence technology according to which the Soviet Union would supply China with technical data for manufacturing nuclear weapons. In May 1958 Foreign Minister Ch'en Yi told German correspondents in Peking that China would make atomic bombs. On June 20, 1959, the Soviet Union, according to China, unilaterally abrogated the 1957 agreements on weapons development. On July 31, 1963, China issued a statement denouncing the Moscow Partial Test Ban Treaty as “a big fraud to fool the people of the world.” On October 16, 1964, China announced that an atomic device had been exploded in western China and proposed that “a summit conference of all the countries of the world be convened to discuss the question of the complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons.”

The Hazards of Operations Involving Nuclear Weapons during the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 207-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milton Leitenberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
False Alarms ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

This article provides an overview of the perils of U.S. and Soviet nuclear war planning during the Cold War. In particular, the article discusses instances of false alarms, when one side or the other picked up indications of an imminent attack by the other side and had to take measures to determine whether the indicators were accurate. None of these incidents posed a large danger of an accidental nuclear war, but they illustrate the inherent risks of the war preparations that both the United States and the Soviet Union took for their immense nuclear arsenals.

scholarly journals „Neue Weltordnung“

2001 ◽  
Vol 31 (125) ◽  
pp. 523-539 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Young ◽  
Simon Hegelich
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Military Policy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
Current Belief ◽  
Popular View ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Comprehensive Test ◽  
Test Ban

The attacks on 11th September are – according to the current belief – a turning point in the US-foreign policy. The authors contest this popular view and suggest that a new military policy was already designed in the aftermath of the collaps of the Soviet Union in 1990. Focussing on the Gulf War and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty the authors argue, that the USA has relied on both unilateralism and mulitlateralism to further its particular foreign policy intersts.

Nuclear Strategy and World Order: The United States Imperative

1982 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Rene Beres
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear Disarmament ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty ◽  
Comprehensive Test ◽  
Test Ban ◽  
Active Preparation

This paper argues that current US nuclear strategy goes beyond the legitimate objective of survivable strategic forces to active preparation for nuclear war fighting. The proponents of this counterforce strategy claim it is necessary to make US deterrence more credible. The author rejects this claim and shows how US strategy actually degrades US security. Moreover, the author contends that it actually encourages nuclear war because it is based on a number of implausible and contradictory assumptions. After examining these assumptions in detail, the author proposes an alternative strategy for nuclear war avoidance and for improving the likelihood of nuclear disarmament. This strategy involves a comprehensive test ban treaty, joint renunciation of first use, and the establishment of new and more extensive nuclear weapon free zones.

The Soviet Union and Nuclear Proliferation

Slavic Review ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 468-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
William C. Potter
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Export ◽  
Control Policy ◽  
Nuclear Nonproliferation ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
Export Policy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Test Ban

Prevention of the spread of nuclear weapons has long been a theme of the Soviet! Union's declaratory arms control policy. It has also found concrete expression in Moscow's endorsement of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America of 1967 (Treaty of Tlatelolco), the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968, and, since 1958, in the stringent nuclear export policy of the Soviet Union. Although much of Moscow's nonproliferation rhetoric and elements of its nonproliferation behavior can be explained in terms of narrow self-interest (namely, prevention of access to nuclear weapons by traditional adversaries), the range and consistency of its nonproliferation efforts, as well as certain specific actions, indicate that the Soviet leadership appreciates the dangers posed by the diffusion of nuclear weapons.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Cameron
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
Johnson Administration ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Central Argument

The introductory chapter outlines an established consensus that the United States’ shift from a policy of nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union to a policy that emphasized arms control, mutual assured destruction, and nuclear parity was the result of nuclear-strategic calculus. It then shows how declassified records of Nixon’s conversations with his advisors on the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) disprove that thesis. It goes on to outline how Kennedy and Johnson administration officials also acted in ways that contradicted their private comments. Through brief summaries of the subsequent chapters, it then explicates the central argument of the book: that all three presidents were engaged in a double game to reconcile their personal doubts regarding the utility of nuclear weapons with the prevailing public and congressional mood during their administrations. It concludes by suggesting this dynamic is of enduring relevance to the formulation of American nuclear strategy.

Containing uncertainty: options for British nuclear strategy

1993 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-267
Author(s):  
Beatrice Heuser
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Military Strength ◽  
The Cost

For NATO's first four decades the overwhelming threat to its members' security arose from the enormous military strength of the Soviet Union … the allies were unable to match the numerical levels of the Warsaw Pact's conventional armaments and manpower. This … underlined the key role of nuclear weapons in deterrence, ensuring that the cost of aggression was plainly too high for any attacker to contemplate.

scholarly journals Why Arms Control?

Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 149 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-115
Author(s):  
Jon Brook Wolfsthal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

America survived the nuclear age through a complex combination of diplomatic and military decisions, and a good deal of luck. One of the tools that proved its value in both reducing the risks of nuclear use and setting rules for the ongoing nuclear competition were negotiated, legally binding, and verified arms control agreements. Such pacts between the United States and the Soviet Union arguably prevented the nuclear arms racing from getting worse and helped both sides climb off the Cold War nuclear precipice. Several important agreements remain in place between the United States and Russia, to the benefit of both states. Arms control is under threat, however, from domestic forces in the United States and from Russian actions that range from treaty violations to the broader weaponization of risk. But arms control can and should play a useful role in reducing the risk of nuclear war and forging a new agreement between Moscow and Washington on the new rules of the nuclear road.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document