Kategoria BISAC: History >> Military - Nuclear Warfare

We are at a critical juncture in world politics. Nuclear strategy and policy have risen to the top of the global policy agenda, and issues ranging from a nuclear Iran to the global zero movement are generating sharp debate. The historical origins of our contemporary nuclear world are deeply consequential for contemporary policy, but it is crucial that decisions are made on the basis of fact rather than myth and misapprehension. In Nuclear Statecraft, Francis J. Gavin challenges key elements of the widely accepted narrative about the history of the atomic age and the consequences...

Inspired by President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" speech, scientists at the Atomic Energy Commission and the University of California's Radiation Laboratory began in 1957 a program they called Plowshare. Joined by like-minded government officials, scientists, and business leaders, champions of "peaceful nuclear explosions" maintained that they could create new elements and isotopes for general use, build storage facilities for water or fuel, mine ores, increase oil and natural gas production, generate heat for power production, and construct roads, harbors, and canals. By...

Nuclear technology is dual use in nature, meaning that it can be used to produce nuclear energy or to build nuclear weapons. Despite security concerns about proliferation, the United States and other nuclear nations have regularly shared with other countries nuclear technology, materials, and knowledge for peaceful purposes. In Atomic Assistance, Matthew Fuhrmann argues that governments use peaceful nuclear assistance as a tool of economic statecraft. Nuclear suppliers hope that they can reap the benefits of foreign aid improving relationships with their allies, limiting the...

Nuclear technology is dual use in nature, meaning that it can be used to produce nuclear energy or to build nuclear weapons. Despite security concerns about proliferation, the United States and other nuclear nations have regularly shared with other countries nuclear technology, materials, and knowledge for peaceful purposes. In Atomic Assistance, Matthew Fuhrmann argues that governments use peaceful nuclear assistance as a tool of economic statecraft. Nuclear suppliers hope that they can reap the benefits of foreign aid improving relationships with their allies, limiting the...

This book offers a comprehensive examination of the important security issue of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.

Nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament have returned to the top of the international political agenda. The issue assumes particular importance in regard to NATO, given that some 150 200 US tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) are still present in five countries belonging to the Alliance (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey). The past few years have seen animated debate in the United States and Europe on the role of such weapons in the current scenario of...

Since the end of the Cold War, significant attention has focussed on the issue of nuclear deterrence and in particular whether formal nuclear security guarantees from nuclear weapons states to non-nuclear weapons states involving the possible use of nuclear weapons have a place in the twenty-first century global strategic landscape. Growing support for nuclear disarmament in the US and elsewhere has seen serious doubts being raised about the ongoing utility of extended nuclear deterrence.

This book provides the first detailed analysis of the way in which extended nuclear deterrence...

Exploring environmental literature from a feminist perspective, this volume presents a diversity of feminist ecocritical approaches to affirm the continuing contributions, relevance, and necessity of a feminist perspective in environmental literature, culture, and science. Feminist ecocriticism has a substantial history, with roots in second- and third-wave feminist literary criticism, women's environmental writing and social change activisms, and eco-cultural critique, and yet both feminist and ecofeminist literary perspectives have been marginalized. The essays in this collection build...

This book examines the use of concepts specifically weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in US foreign policy discourse.

Current analysis of WMD definition has made headway into identifying the repercussions that the conceptual conflation of such diverse weapons typically understood as a reference to nuclear, biological and chemical weapons has for international security. While the concept assumes these weapons are equal, the vast disparity between them, and their disparity from the conventional weapons from which they are supposedly distinct, means this approach is seen as unreflective of...

The bomb is Israel's collective ineffable--the nation's last great taboo. This bargain has a name: in Hebrew, it is called amimut, or opacity. By adhering to the bargain, which was born in a secret deal between Richard Nixon...

Shortly after World War II, the Middle East became a locus for nations seeking to acquire nuclear missiles and the means to deliver them to their enemies. Israel was the first; Libya and Iraq followed suit. Pakistan now possesses a substantial number of nuclear weapons, to which longtime rival India will no doubt respond. The implications of the political and security dynamics of the Middle East for the United States and other nations are truly profound and sobering.

"Beyond Sand and Oil" provides a nation-by-nation overview of the evolution of nuclear weapons programs in what is likely...

Written by a leading scholar in the field of nuclear weapons and international relations, this book examines the problem of order arising from the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

This central problem of international order has its origins in the nineteenth century, when industrialization and the emergence of new sciences, technologies and administrative capabilities greatly expanded states abilities to inflict injury, ushering in the era of total war. It became acute in the mid-twentieth century, with the invention of the atomic bomb and the pre-eminent role ascribed to...