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The Effects of Warning on Strategic Stability

The Effects of Warning on Strategic Stability PDF Author: Bruce G. Blair
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815707088
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 47

Book Description
Among its many important effects, the political revolution in central Europe has provided a sharp reminder that international security is as much a state of mind as it is a physical condition. The threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, long hypothesized by Western defense ministries on the basis of a perceived imbalance in inherent conventional force capability, is now acknowledged to be a practical impossibility because shifts in political alignment have been credited. In the wake of that judgement, the force deployments themselves are virtually certain to be reduced, equalized, and disengaged, thereby removing firepower advantage as a threat to international stability. Moreover, though the intrinsic connection is remote, a similar judgement seems to be affecting global strategic deployments. As strategic forces are projected to be reduced to common ceilings by mutual agreement, the fear of preemptive attacks on theoretically vulnerable land-based installations appears to be receding more rapidly than the inherent capability that originally inspired it. This relief from the narrowly focused, obsessive fears that have dominated U.S. security policy for several decades is certainly a constructive development, but unfortunately it is not comprehensively valid. For strategic forces in particular, some subtle interaction between human judgement and physical capability remain potentially dangerous, presenting a security problem that will not be resolved simply by completing the projected agenda of national weapons development and international arms control agreements. The problem arises from conceivable combinations of events that are undoubtedly improbable but unprecedentedly catastrophic should any of them ever occur. The standards of safety that have evolved for improbable disasters of much smaller magnitude—nuclear reactor meltdown, for example—have been applied to only peacetime operations and have not been extended to the circumstances of advanced crisis or to the actual implications of combat operations. To appreciate the implications of this limitation and the dangers that emerge from it requires a substantial revision of standard perspectives on strategic security.

The Effects of Warning on Strategic Stability

The Effects of Warning on Strategic Stability PDF Author: Bruce G. Blair
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815707088
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 47

Book Description
Among its many important effects, the political revolution in central Europe has provided a sharp reminder that international security is as much a state of mind as it is a physical condition. The threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, long hypothesized by Western defense ministries on the basis of a perceived imbalance in inherent conventional force capability, is now acknowledged to be a practical impossibility because shifts in political alignment have been credited. In the wake of that judgement, the force deployments themselves are virtually certain to be reduced, equalized, and disengaged, thereby removing firepower advantage as a threat to international stability. Moreover, though the intrinsic connection is remote, a similar judgement seems to be affecting global strategic deployments. As strategic forces are projected to be reduced to common ceilings by mutual agreement, the fear of preemptive attacks on theoretically vulnerable land-based installations appears to be receding more rapidly than the inherent capability that originally inspired it. This relief from the narrowly focused, obsessive fears that have dominated U.S. security policy for several decades is certainly a constructive development, but unfortunately it is not comprehensively valid. For strategic forces in particular, some subtle interaction between human judgement and physical capability remain potentially dangerous, presenting a security problem that will not be resolved simply by completing the projected agenda of national weapons development and international arms control agreements. The problem arises from conceivable combinations of events that are undoubtedly improbable but unprecedentedly catastrophic should any of them ever occur. The standards of safety that have evolved for improbable disasters of much smaller magnitude—nuclear reactor meltdown, for example—have been applied to only peacetime operations and have not been extended to the circumstances of advanced crisis or to the actual implications of combat operations. To appreciate the implications of this limitation and the dangers that emerge from it requires a substantial revision of standard perspectives on strategic security.

The Paradox of Power

The Paradox of Power PDF Author: David C. Gompert
Publisher: Government Printing Office
ISBN: 9780160915734
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
The second half of the 20th century featured a strategic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. That competition avoided World War III in part because during the 1950s, scholars like Henry Kissinger, Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, and Albert Wohlstetter analyzed the fundamental nature of nuclear deterrence. Decades of arms control negotiations reinforced these early notions of stability and created a mutual understanding that allowed U.S.-Soviet competition to proceed without armed conflict. The first half of the 21st century will be dominated by the relationship between the United States and China. That relationship is likely to contain elements of both cooperation and competition. Territorial disputes such as those over Taiwan and the South China Sea will be an important feature of this competition, but both are traditional disputes, and traditional solutions suggest themselves. A more difficult set of issues relates to U.S.-Chinese competition and cooperation in three domains in which real strategic harm can be inflicted in the current era: nuclear, space, and cyber. Just as a clearer understanding of the fundamental principles of nuclear deterrence maintained adequate stability during the Cold War, a clearer understanding of the characteristics of these three domains can provide the underpinnings of strategic stability between the United States and China in the decades ahead. That is what this book is about.

The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War

The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War PDF Author: Bruce G. Blair
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Book Description
POLITICS/CURRENT EVENTS

Strategic Stability in the Second Nuclear Age

Strategic Stability in the Second Nuclear Age PDF Author: Gregory D. Koblentz
Publisher: Council on Foreign Relations
ISBN: 0876096119
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 68

Book Description
The world has entered a second nuclear age shaped by rising nuclear states and military technologies. Gregory Koblentz argues that the United States should work with the other nuclear-armed states to manage threats to nuclear stability in the near term and establish processes for multilateral arms control efforts over the longer term.

The Paradox of Power

The Paradox of Power PDF Author: David C. Gompert
Publisher: Department of the Army
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Looking deeply into the matter of strategic vulnerability, the authors address questions that this vulnerability poses: Do conditions exist for Sino-U.S. mutual deterrence in these realms? Might the two states agree on reciprocal restraint? What practical measures might build confidence in restraint? How would strategic restraint affect Sino-U.S. relations as well as security in and beyond East Asia?

War at the Speed of Light

War at the Speed of Light PDF Author: Louis A. Del Monte
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1640124357
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
War at the Speed of Light describes the revolutionary and ever-increasing role of directed-energy weapons (such as laser, microwave, electromagnetic pulse, and cyberspace weapons) in warfare. Louis A. Del Monte delineates the threat that such weapons pose to disrupting the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, which has kept the major powers of the world from engaging in nuclear warfare. Potential U.S. adversaries, such as China and Russia, are developing hypersonic missiles and using swarming tactics as a means to defeat the U.S. military. In response, the U.S. Department of Defense established the 2018 National Security Strategy, emphasizing directed-energy weapons, which project devastation at the speed of light and are capable of destroying hypersonic missiles and enemy drones and missile swarms. Del Monte analyzes how modern warfare is changing in three fundamental ways: the pace of war is quickening, the rate at which weapons project devastation is reaching the speed of light, and cyberspace is now officially a battlefield. In this acceleration of combat called "hyperwar," Del Monte shows how disturbingly close the world is to losing any deterrence to nuclear warfare.

Principles of Global Security

Principles of Global Security PDF Author: John D. Steinbruner
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 9780815798309
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
From the earliest human records, warfare has been both an organizing focus and a prime source of political motivation. Countless battles have been fought in the course of colonizing the planet, and the experience has created a legacy of military confrontation that many people consider immutable. Since preparations for war and the occasional conduct of it have been central preoccupations for virtually all the major states throughout time, it is widely assumed that the pattern is rooted in human nature and will endure indefinitely. But contemporary civilization is undergoing a monumental transformation affecting its most basic features. The combined effects of information technology, population dynamics, and the globalization of economic activity are altering some of the critical operating conditions of human societies and appear to be inducing a new pattern of interaction. Correspondingly, fundamental changes in the practice of war-or what is now more politely called international security-can be expected to follow. Principles of Global Security anticipates the major implications of this massive transformation for security policy. John D. Steinbruner, one of the nation's leading specialists on defense issues, identifies formative problems and organizing principles relating to the predictable issues of security. He examines in sequence how the configuration of nuclear and conventional forces might be affected, how the problems of communal violence and dangers of technical proliferation might be managed, and how security relationships among the major states might be altered. One of the fundamental implications of globalization in a post-cold war environment is a shift in security policy from deterrence to reassurance, from active confrontation to cooperative engagement. Without an opponent to justify preparation for large-scale traditional missions, nations must establish safer and less volatile patterns of deployment. Maintaining global security in the twenty-

Return to Cold War

Return to Cold War PDF Author: Robert Legvold
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 9781509501892
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The 2014 crisis in Ukraine sent a tottering U.S.-Russian relationship over a cliff - a dangerous descent into deep mistrust, severed ties, and potential confrontation reminiscent of the Cold War period. In this incisive new analysis, leading expert on Soviet and Russian foreign policy, Robert Legvold, explores in detail this qualitatively new phase in a relationship that has alternated between hope and disappointment for much of the past two decades. Tracing the long and tortured path leading to this critical juncture, he contends that the recent deterioration of Russia-U.S. relations deserves to be understood as a return to cold war with great and lasting consequences. In drawing out the commonalities between the original cold war and the current confrontation, Return to Cold War brings a fresh perspective to what is happening between the two countries, its broader significance beyond the immediate issues of the day, and how political leaders in both countries might adjust their approaches in order, as the author urges, to make this new cold war "as short and shallow as possible."

The Anthrax Vaccine Debate

The Anthrax Vaccine Debate PDF Author: Richard A. Hersack
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 142899033X
Category : Anthrax
Languages : en
Pages : 84

Book Description


Stable Peace

Stable Peace PDF Author: Kenneth E. Boulding
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477305718
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
The human race has often put a high value on struggle, strife, turmoil, and excitement. Peace has been regarded as a utopian, unattainable, perhaps dull ideal or as some random element over which we have no control. However, the desperate necessities of the nuclear age have forced us to take peace seriously as an object of both personal and national policy. Stable Peace attempts to answer the question, If we had a policy for peace, what would it look like? A policy for peace aims to speed up the historically slow, painful, but persistent transition from a state of continual war and turmoil to one of continual peace. In a stable peace, the war-peace system is tipped firmly toward peace and away from the cycle of folly, illusion, and ill will that leads to war. Boulding proposes a number of modest, easily attainable, eminently reasonable policies directed toward this goal. His recommendations include the removal of national boundaries from political agendas, the encouragement of reciprocal acts of good will between potential enemies, the exploration of the theory and practice of nonviolence, the development of governmental and nongovernmental organizations to promote peace, and the development of research in the whole area of peace and conflict management. Written in straightforward, lucid prose, Stable Peace will be of importance to politicians, policy makers, economists, diplomats, all concerned citizens, and all those interested in international relations and the resolution of conflict.