Nuclear warfare beyond counterforce

A counterforce attack intends to disable an opponent's nuclear arsenal to limit potential damage from that adversary. We postulate a future when hardening and deeply burying fixed sites, transition to mobile strategic systems, and improved defences make executing a counterforce strategy against an adversary's nuclear forces extremely difficult. Additionally, our postulated future has multiple nations possessing nuclear weapons. Consequently, each country needs to consider multiple actors when addressing the question of how to deter a potential adversary's nuclear attack. We examine six nuclear targeting alternatives and consider how to deter them. These strategies include nuclear demonstration, conventional military targets, and attacks consisting of communications/electronics, economic, infrastructure, and population centers that a nation might consider striking with nuclear weapons. Since these alternative strikes require only a few nuclear weapons, executing one of them would not significantly shift the balance of nuclear forces. The attacking country's remaining nuclear forces may inhibit the attacked country or its allies from responding. How can nations deter these limited nuclear attacks? Potentially, threatening economic counter-strikes seems to be the best alternative. How might escalation be controlled in the event of a limited attack? Other instruments of power, such as political or economic, might be employed to bolster deterrence against these types of nuclear strikes.

Introduction

‘Introduction’ is a wide-ranging theoretical and historical argument for the fundamental importance of the concept of horror to the history of human culture and civilization. Horror is written into our earliest cultural and artistic documents, and our religions and their rituals. There are differences between horror and terror; the Gothic; the uncanny; and the weird that are important when considering horror. Horror is a culturally determined form that suffers from historical anxieties. This can be seen by looking at such as imperialism, nuclear warfare, and climate change.

From World War II to Cold War Catholicism

The wartime struggle of Pius XII against totalitarianism focuses the identity of the Church on the defense of rights and the important connection between internal national developments and international stability. The American bishops’ adoption of the papal program moves the description of public Catholic identity in ambivalent directions. On the one hand, anti-communism shapes an organic presentation of the Judeo-Christian tradition united to the American way of life as the opposite of an atheistic and totalitarian “system of belief.” The sovereignty of God, obedience to lawfully constituted authority, and the unity between divine, natural, and positive law become dominant characteristics of the faith. On the other hand, this same rapprochement with American political values emphasizes equality, democratic participation, and individual rights. These ambivalences manifest themselves in different ways in the Catholic approach to family life and nuclear warfare.