Tempting Fate

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul C. Avey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Biological Weapons ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
The World ◽  
Chemical And Biological Weapons ◽  
Tempting Fate

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.

“Little Plants in the Country”: Henry Ford's Village Industries and the Beginning of Decentralized Technology in Modern America

Prospects ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 181-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard P. Segal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
New York ◽  
Information Processing ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physical Proximity ◽  
The World ◽  
Word Processors

“Technology Spurs Decentralization Across the Country.” So reads a 1984 New York Times article on real-estate trends in the United States. The contemporary revolution in information processing and transmittal now allows large businesses and other institutions to disperse their offices and other facilities across the country, even across the world, without loss of the policy- and decision-making abilities formerly requiring regular physical proximity. Thanks to computers, word processors, and the like, decentralization has become a fact of life in America and other highly technological societies.

Iraq versus the United States

Tempting Fate ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 40-62
Author(s):  
Paul C. Avey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Defense ◽  
Military Action ◽  
The Us ◽  
Saddam Hussein ◽  
Political Dispute

This chapter provides a background for Iraqi behavior during the period of American nuclear monopoly beginning in 1979 when Saddam Hussein was officially Iraqi president, focusing most heavily on events in 1989–1991. In an intense political dispute, Iraqi leadership took actions they believed would fall below the threshold of nuclear use. Most of the limitations that Iraq exhibited were due to its own weakness; it could do little more. For Iraq as a weak actor, war with the United States was possible precisely because it would pose such a low danger to the United States. Even then, Iraqi leadership incorporated the US nuclear arsenal into their decision making in 1990–1991. That confrontation is the most important to examine because it involved Iraqi military action that Iraqi leaders believed would invite some form of US response, and US compellent demands did not center on Iraqi regime change. In 1990, Saddam and his lieutenants held their own unconventional weapons in reserve and discounted an American nuclear strike because of the high strategic costs that such a strike would impose on the United States. They also undertook various civil defense measures to minimize losses from nuclear strikes. Fortunately, the Americans had little intention of using nuclear weapons and did not face a need to resort to nuclear use.

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’.

Delaying Doomsday

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rupal N. Mehta
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Leadership Transition ◽  
Military Force ◽  
National Data ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Policy Objectives ◽  
Cross National

Why are states willing to give up their nuclear weapons programs? This book presents a new theory for how external inducements supplied by the United States can convince even the most committed of proliferators to abandon weapons pursuit. Existing theories focus either on carrots or sticks. I explore how using both positive and negative inducements, in the shadow of military force, can persuade both friends and foes not to continue their nuclear weapons pursuit. I draw on worldwide cross-national data on nuclear reversal, case studies of Iran and North Korea, among other countries, and interviews with diplomats, policy-makers, and analysts. I show that the majority of proliferators have been persuaded to reverse their nuclear weapons programs when offered incentives from the United States. Moreover, I demonstrate that these tools are especially effective during periods of leadership transition and can work on both allies and adversaries. My theory and evidence also suggest a broader conception of counterproliferation than currently exists, identifying how carrots and sticks used together can accomplish one of the international community’s most important policy objectives.

Forging an Anthropology of Neoliberal Fascism

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-40
Author(s):  
Adrienne Pine
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Popular Discourse ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
The World ◽  
Vulnerable People ◽  
Analytical Category

In the late teens, the rise of racist, xenophobic nationalism in the United States and around the world has been frequently labeled fascist in popular discourse, and is being increasingly discussed as fascism by scholars as well. In this article, drawing on case studies from Honduras and the United States, I argue that—despite Orwell’s warning that the term has lost its meaning—anthropologists can still productively engage fascism as an analytical category. An anthropological engagement of contemporary fascism must help to elucidate the strong links between neoliberal capitalism and today’s global militarized nationalism. It also requires that anthropologists reframe our work as strategy, from a position of somatic (not pragmatic) solidarity with structurally vulnerable people everywhere.

The Slippery Slope to Preventive War

2003 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neta C. Crawford
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Slippery Slope ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Biological Weapons ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Unconventional War ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Chemical And Biological Weapons

The Bush administration's arguments in favor of a preemptive doctrine rest on the view that warfare has been transformed. As Colin Powell argues, “It's a different world … it's a new kind of threat.” And in several important respects, war has changed along the lines the administration suggests, although that transformation has been under way for at least the last ten to fifteen years. Unconventional adversaries prepared to wage unconventional war can conceal their movements, weapons, and immediate intentions and conduct devastating surprise attacks. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, though not widely dispersed, are more readily available than they were in the recent past. And the everyday infrastructure of the United States can be turned against it as were the planes the terrorists hijacked on September 11, 2001. Further, the administration argues that we face enemies who “reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands.” Although vulnerability could certainly be reduced in many ways, it is impossible to achieve complete invulnerability.

Clinton Announces New Initiatives to Counter Emergent Terrorist Threats

1999 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-142
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Computer Systems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rogue States ◽  
The World

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.

scholarly journals Efektivitas Penggunaan Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) dalam Strategi Kontra-Terorisme Amerika Serikat di Pakistan (2004-2012)

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Egalita Irfan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
The United States ◽  
Terrorist Organizations ◽  
Counter Terrorism ◽  
Advanced Technologies ◽  
The World ◽  
Aerial Vehicle

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is an armed unmanned plane, which is also one of the most advanced technologies developed by the United States. UAV is more superior compared with other kinds of weapon. Currently, it is used in many parts of the world as a part of the United States' counter-terrorism measure. However, the use of UAV in Pakistan since 2004 to 2012 does not successfully reduce the number of terrorist attack that happens on that country. This research aims to figure out the reasons behind this failure through the use of congruence in retrospective. The results show that the failure of UAV relies upon 3 factors: (1) US did not really understand the characteristic of targeted terrorist organizations, (2) there is a mistake in the decision making based on the intelligence cycle, and (3) the nonexistent of local society's support.

The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning

2012 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Urban Planning ◽  
Social Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Science Discipline ◽  
Science Discipline ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Goods ◽  
Key Questions

This publication is an authoritative volume on planning, a long-established professional social science discipline in the United States and throughout the world. Edited by professors at two planning institutes in the United States, it collects together over forty-five noted field experts to discuss three key questions: Why plan? How and what do we plan? Who plans for whom? These questions are then applied across three major topics in planning: States, Markets, and the Provision of Social Goods; The Methods and Substance of Planning; and Agency, Implementation, and Decision Making. This text covers the key components of the discipline.

Japan, 1952–1980

2018 ◽  
pp. 79-109
Author(s):  
Alexander Lanoszka
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Alliance ◽  
The Military

Many scholars would hold that a robust military alliance as well as strong anti-nuclear norms in domestic society would make any nuclear proliferation-related behaviour unlikely on the part of Japan. This chapter challenges such arguments, showing that the alliance with the United States did not fully inhibit Japan’s nuclear ambitions since Japan ratcheted up its interest in enrichment and reprocessing technologies in the late 1960. Indeed, Japan’s nuclear interest piqued amid concerns that the military alliance was weakening. Moreover, although the alliance did discourage some level of interest in nuclear weapons, the United States was reluctant to coerce Japan directly on this issue. Domestic politics and—to a lesser extent—prestige considerations were arguably a greater influence on Japan’s nuclear decision-making in the 1970s than alliance-related ones.

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