Living with Uncertainty: Modeling China's Nuclear Survivability

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 84-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wu Riqiang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Uncertainty Modeling ◽  
The United States ◽  
Deterrent Effect ◽  
Strategic Stability ◽  
Hypothetical Scenario ◽  
Nuclear Attack ◽  
Strong Deterrent ◽  
Nuclear Exchange

Many strategists argue that to deter a nuclear attack, states must be certain of their ability to retaliate after a nuclear first strike. China's nuclear posture of uncertain retaliation suggests an alternative logic. Given the catastrophic consequences of a nuclear attack, uncertain retaliation can have a strong deterrent effect, and assured retaliation is not necessary. A simplified nuclear exchange model developed to evaluate China's nuclear retaliatory capabilities against the Soviet Union in 1984 and the United States in 2000 and 2010 shows that China's nuclear retaliatory capability has been and remains far from assured. In its 2010 Nuclear Posture Review Report, the United States promised to maintain strategic stability with China; therefore, the 2010 scenario can be considered as a baseline for China-U.S. strategic stability. Both China and the United States are developing or modernizing their strategic offensive and defensive weapons. The technical competition between China and the United States favors each in different ways. A hypothetical scenario of China versus the United States in 2025 reveals that China-U.S. strategic stability will likely be maintained at no lower than its 2010 level.

The Double Game

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Cameron
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
Strategic Stability ◽  
Antiballistic Missile ◽  
Missile System

This book tracks the development of the United States’ first antiballistic missile system from the beginning of the John F. Kennedy administration through its almost total prohibition with the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which the United States and Soviet Union signed in May 1972. Historians generally interpret the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that led to the ABM Treaty as signaling the United States’ acceptance of strategic stability based on mutual assured destruction (MAD) and approximate nuclear parity between the superpowers. The book argues that this is mistaken, because declassified records indicate that Richard Nixon believed that the United States required nuclear superiority to maintain its national security commitments. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Nixon all engaged in a double game, in which they attempted to reconcile their personal feelings about the utility of nuclear weapons with the demands of maintaining a façade of strategic coherence to the American public and Congress. Kennedy and Johnson, who were personally far more skeptical than Nixon regarding the merits of nuclear superiority, were forced to adopt a public posture that emphasized its importance, because that was the prevailing public and congressional sentiment at the time. This only changed when the Vietnam War precipitated a collapse in the American domestic consensus behind superiority in 1969, forcing President Nixon to sign strategic arms limitation agreements, the philosophy behind which he profoundly opposed. The book thereby places domestic politics at the center of the formulation of US nuclear strategy.

The Window of Vulnerability That Wasn't: Soviet Military Buildup in the 1970s—A Research Note

2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavel Podvig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Large Degree ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Military Buildup ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Exchange ◽  
The U.S

The Soviet strategic modernization program of the 1970s was one of the most consequential developments of the Cold War. Deployment of new intercontinental ballistic missiles and the dramatic increase in the number of strategic warheads in the Soviet arsenal created a sense of vulnerability in the United States that was, to a large degree, responsible for the U.S. military buildup of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the escalation of Cold War tensions during that period. U.S. assessments concluded that the Soviet Union was seeking to achieve a capability to fight and win a nuclear war. Estimates of missile accuracy and silo hardness provided by the U.S. intelligence community led many in the United States to conclude that the Soviet Union was building a strategic missile force capable of destroying most U.S. missiles in a counterforce strike and of surviving a subsequent nuclear exchange. Soviet archival documents that have recently become available demonstrate that this conclusion was wrong. The U.S. estimates substantially overestimated the accuracy of the Soviet Union's missiles and the degree of silo reinforcement. As the data demonstrate, the Soviet missile force did not have the capability to launch a successful first strike. Moreover, the data strongly suggest that the Soviet Union never attempted to acquire a first-strike capability, concentrating instead on strategies based on retaliation.

The Soviet Union versus the United States

Tempting Fate ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 114-134
Author(s):  
Paul C. Avey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Berlin Crisis ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Attack ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
Considerable Pressure

This chapter assesses Soviet behavior during the Berlin Crisis. The Soviet Union proceeded cautiously throughout the period of American atomic monopoly. That restraint continued during the Berlin crisis and is attributable in part to US nuclear monopoly. The Soviets avoided a direct challenge to the United States outside their immediate sphere of influence prior to 1948. From the Soviet perspective, the worsening security situation in Germany in 1948 necessitated action. The subsequent Berlin blockade was designed to exert considerable pressure on the Americans. As a conventionally capable nonnuclear power, though, the Soviets imposed tight constraints on their actions for fear of fighting a war with the United States that would turn nuclear. As a result, no war occurred despite the Soviet ability to inflict a rapid military defeat on the United States in a key area of the world for both countries. Consistent with the framework developed in Chapter 1, Soviet leaders took steps to reduce the benefits of nuclear use for the Americans by reducing the danger to the United States during the crisis and taking steps to hedge against an American nuclear attack.

SALT and Carter's Dilemma

Worldview ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 22 (9) ◽  
pp. 7-13
Author(s):  
Gary L. Guertner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Strategic Stability ◽  
The Soviet Union

SALT, the strategic arms limitation talks between the United States and the Soviet Union, has been formally in progress since 1969, spanning the administrations of three American presidents. The often understated emphasis has been on maintaining strategic stability through quantitative limits and qualitative shaping of forces, present and future, and through formally agreed-upon ceilings rather than on the reduction of existing systems or inventories.

Utopias of One

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Original Research ◽  
The Soviet Union

This book is a new account of utopian writing. It examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. In this way it captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. The book contributes to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. It models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.

Trust, but Verify

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This book uses trust—with its emotional and predictive aspects—to explore international relations in the second half of the Cold War, beginning with the late 1960s. The détente of the 1970s led to the development of some limited trust between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lessened international tensions and enabled advances in areas such as arms control. However, it also created uncertainty in other areas, especially on the part of smaller states that depended on their alliance leaders for protection. The chapters in this volume look at how the “emotional” side of the conflict affected the dynamics of various Cold War relations: between the superpowers, within the two ideological blocs, and inside individual countries on the margins of the East–West confrontation.

Enemy Number One

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rósa Magnúsdóttir
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Peaceful Coexistence ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
Inferiority Complex ◽  
Available Information

Enemy Number One tells the story of Soviet propaganda and ideology toward the United States during the early Cold War. From Stalin’s anti-American campaign to Khrushchev’s peaceful coexistence, this book covers Soviet efforts to control available information about the United States and to influence the development of Soviet-American cultural relations until official cultural exchanges were realized between the two countries. The Soviet and American veterans of the legendary 1945 meeting on the Elbe and their subsequent reunions represent the changes in the superpower relationship: during the late Stalin era, the memory of the wartime alliance was fully silenced, but under Khrushchev it was purposefully revived and celebrated as a part of the propaganda about peaceful coexistence. The author brings to life the propaganda warriors and ideological chiefs of the early Cold War period in the Soviet Union, revealing their confusion and insecurities as they tried to navigate the uncertain world of the late Stalin and early Khrushchev cultural bureaucracy. She also shows how concerned Soviet authorities were with their people’s presumed interest in the United States of America, resorting to monitoring and even repression, thereby exposing the inferiority complex of the Soviet project as it related to the outside world.

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