scholarly journals On Adapting Nuclear Deterrence to Reduce Nuclear Risk

Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 149 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-83
Author(s):  
Brad Roberts
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comprehensive Approach ◽  
Nuclear Deterrence ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Cold War

Since the end of the Cold War, changes to the practice of nuclear deterrence by the United States have been pursued as part of a comprehensive approach aimed at reducing nuclear risks. These changes have included steps to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons in U.S. defense and deterrence strategies. Looking to the future, the United States can do more, but only if the conditions are right. Policy-makers must avoid steps that have superficial appeal but would actually result in a net increase in nuclear risk. These include steps that make U.S. nuclear deterrence unreliable for the problems for which it remains relevant.

The First Years of the Cold War

1952 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-547
Author(s):  
Dana G. Munro
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Secretary Of State ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Cold War

We rarely have an opportunity to study the intimate reactions of two members of the President's cabinet to a series of very recent and very important events. Both Speaking Frankly and The Forrestal Diaries cover about the same period—the period when the United States was slowly awakening to the realities of the postwar world—but they are very different in other respects. Secretary Byrnes' book was written to give a picture of the problems that he encountered during his tenure as Secretary of State and to express his considered views about policy for the future. The Diaries, on the other hand, were never intended for publication, and without connective matter supplied by the editor they would be merely a collection of memoranda of meetings and conversations, copies or summaries of documents prepared by other people, personal letters, and less frequent entries in which Mr. Forrestal recorded his own opinions or impressions.

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.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Cameron
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Personal Beliefs ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
The Cold War

The conclusion summarizes the argument of the book as a whole, pointing to the central importance of domestic public and congressional opinion since the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and through the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of Richard Nixon’s administration, in the formulation of US nuclear strategy, even when such opinion diverges fundamentally from the views of the president. This forces presidents into playing a double game in their attempt to reconcile their personal beliefs on nuclear weapons with public expectations. The chapter argues that this dilemma is common across U.S. national security policymaking, but is especially acute in the case of nuclear strategy because of its extremely abstract nature. The chapter concludes by showing how the double game between presidents and their publics played out for the rest of the Cold War. It then offers a tentative prediction regarding its resurgence as the United States’ global commitments come under new pressure from Russia and China.

West Germany, 1954–1970

2018 ◽  
pp. 48-78
Author(s):  
Alexander Lanoszka
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Direct Role ◽  
The Cold War

Several leading international scholars argue that West Germany enjoyed limited autonomy in the Cold War and was thus susceptible to American coercion, especially on issues relating to nuclear weapons. This chapter challenges such arguments. It shows that the alliance with the United States was less useful for curbing West German nuclear ambitions than commonly presumed. It also demonstrates that in-theater conventional forces mattered for bolstering American extended nuclear guarantees to West Germany. American coercion of West Germany was important, but it played a much less direct role than what many scholars claim. Other factors—especially domestic politics—drove West Germany’s final choices pertaining to whether it should get nuclear weapons.

Tinkering with Failure (1991–2001)

Special Duty ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 134-161
Author(s):  
Richard J. Samuels
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Environment And Trade ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter provides a straightforward account of Japan's meek surrender to a decade of tentative, groping, half-measure post-Cold War intelligence reform. Like intelligence communities elsewhere, the Japanese intelligence community did not anticipate the end of the Cold War. The “East” and “West” were realigning and even finding common ground—and triumphalism reigned in the “free world.” Since the United States was now by default or by design the world's overwhelming military power, some Japanese policy makers felt less urgency to develop a new, comprehensive intelligence formula to cope with this new world order. The shift in the strategic environment and trade frictions with the United States gave greater purpose to the Japanese's determination to do more and better on their own, and several highly conspicuous intelligence failures would provide the necessary political impetus for change. Experimentation was possible and it was time for tinkering.

The Role of Eastern Europe in America's Containment Policy, 1945–1948

1979 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-92
Author(s):  
Robert Garson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Status ◽  
Containment Policy ◽  
The Cold War

Perhaps the greatest irony in the formative period of the Cold War is that the United States had to resign itself to the Soviets' domination of the very area in which it had at first chosen to challenge them, namely Eastern Europe. Yet America's ultimate acceptance of a Soviet hegemony in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary did not mean, as some histories of the Cold War imply in their omissions, that the status of these countries no longer concerned Washington. In the three years following World War II, American policy makers recognized that while they could not secure democracy or the “ open door ” in Eastern Europe, they could still develop policies for the area that could prove challenging to the Soviet hegemony. Their assumptions and expectations will be the subject of this article. It will show that the Truman administration believed that on developments in Eastern Europe depended the ultimate stability of the Soviet State itself. If the United States could arrest the growth of communism in the Soviet satellites, it could test the insistency of Moscow's power.

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.

The Nuclear Revolution

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Campbell Craig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arms Races ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter, which examines the role of nuclear weapons in the Cold War and the role of the Cold War in the nuclear revolution, argues that the development of nuclear weapons significantly affected the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union beyond the nuclear crises and arms races. It investigates the role of the atomic bomb in making impossible the postwar cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, and evaluates the role of nuclear fear in invalidating the Soviet's Marxism-Leninism ideology. The chapter also considers how the mutual assured destruction pushed the superpowers away from direct military confrontation and into senseless weapon overproduction at home.

The Creation of the American in Paris

2018 ◽  
pp. 13-39
Author(s):  
William Cloonan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Henry James ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Cold War

Henry James’ The American, influenced by de Tocqueville’s studies of American democracy, creates a paradigm of Franco-American images of each other which will persist, with variations and reversals, until almost the end of the Cold War. Simply put, the French see the Americans as wealthy, yet culturally naïve, while the Americans see the French as highly cultivated but duplicitous. The United States is the present and the future, while France is the past.

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