Atomic Blackmail?
Atomic Blackmail?

Author: Dr Simon Ashley Bennett

Publisher: Libri Publishing Limited

Published: 2023-08-11

Total Pages: 91

ISBN-13: 1911451162

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In Atomic Blackmail? Simon Bennett examines the very real possibility of the ‘weaponisation’ of nuclear facilities during the Russia-Ukraine War. The War is being fought in proximity to nuclear facilities and working nuclear power stations, including the six-reactor Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), Europe’s largest, and the decommissioned four-reactor Chernobyl NPP that, in 1986, suffered a catastrophic failure that released radioactive contamination across much of Europe. In 1985, foreign affairs and nuclear expert Bennett Ramberg published Nuclear Power Plants: An Unrecognised Military Peril. In his visionary discourse, Ramberg posited that in future wars, regional or global, nuclear facilities and powerplants might be weaponised to gain political traction over an opponent and neutralise opposing forces’ capacity for battlefield manoeuvre. While, at the time of writing Atomic Blackmail?, none of Ukraine’s fifteen reactors had been damaged in an exchange of fire, the possibility remains that this could happen during Ukraine’s 2023, and subsequent, offensives to expel Russian forces from sovereign Ukrainian territory. Though Ramberg’s nightmare vision of destroyed NPPs rendering a country uninhabitable has not, yet, been realised in the Russia-Ukraine War, the longer and more intense the conflict, the greater the likelihood that one or more of Ukraine’s NPPs will be damaged or, via a credible sabotage threat, used to leverage tactical or strategic advantage. Atomic blackmail finally exampled.

Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance
Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance

Author: Richard K. Betts

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Published: 2010-12-01

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0815717083

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In numerous crises after World War II—Berlin, Korea, the Taiwan Straits, and the Middle East—the United States resorted to vague threats to use nuclear weapons in order to deter Soviet or Chinese military action. On a few occasions the Soviet Union also engaged in nuclear saber-ratling. Using declassified documents and other sources, this volume examines those crises and compares the decisionmaking processes of leaders who considered nuclear threats with the commonly accepted logic of nuclear deterrence and coercion. Rejecting standard explanations of our leader's logic in these cases, Betts suggests that U.S. presidents were neither consciously blufffing when they made nuclear threats, nor prepared to face the consequences if their threats failed. The author also challenges the myth that the 1950s was a golden age of low vulberability for the United Stateas and details how nuclear parity has, and has not, altered conditions that gave rise to nuclear blackmail in the past.

Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy
Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy

Author: Todd S. Sechser

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-02-02

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 110710694X

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Are nuclear weapons useful for coercive diplomacy? This book argues that they are useful for deterrence but not for offensive purposes.

Atomic Friends
Atomic Friends

Author: Zachary Keck

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-08-29

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 153816972X

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Should the United States prevent additional allies from developing atomic weapons? Although preventing U.S. allies and partners from acquiring nuclear weapons was an important part of America’s Cold War goals, in the decades since, Washington has mostly focused on preventing small adversarial states from building the bomb. This has begun to change as countries as diverse as Germany, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, among others, have begun discussing the value of an independent nuclear arsenal. Their ambitions have led to renewed discussion in U.S. foreign policy circles about the consequences of allied proliferation for the United States. Even though four countries have acquired nuclear weapons, this discussion remains abstract, theoretical, and little changed since the earliest days of the nuclear era. Using historical case studies, this book shines a light on this increasingly pressing issue. Keck examines the impact that acquiring nuclear arsenals had after our allies developed them. He examines existing and recently declassified documents, original archival research, and—for the Israel and especially Pakistan cases—interviews with U.S. officials who worked on the events in question.

Atomic Assistance
Atomic Assistance

Author: Matthew Fuhrmann

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2012-07-05

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0801465311

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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 influence of their adversaries, enhancing their energy security by gaining favorable access to oil supplies—without undermining their security. By providing peaceful nuclear assistance, however, countries inadvertently help spread nuclear weapons. Fuhrmann draws on several cases of "Atoms for Peace," including U.S. civilian nuclear assistance to Iran from 1957 to 1979; Soviet aid to Libya from 1975 to 1986; French, Italian, and Brazilian nuclear exports to Iraq from 1975 to 1981; and U.S. nuclear cooperation with India from 2001 to 2008. He also explores decision making in countries such as Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, South Africa, and Syria to determine why states began (or did not begin) nuclear weapons programs and why some programs succeeded while others failed. Fuhrmann concludes that, on average, countries receiving higher levels of peaceful nuclear assistance are more likely to pursue and acquire the bomb—especially if they experience an international crisis after receiving aid.

The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War
The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War

Author: Campbell Craig

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-08-28

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 030014265X

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A study of nuclear warfare’s key role in triggering the post-World War II confrontation between the US and the USSR After a devastating world war, culminating in the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was clear that the United States and the Soviet Union had to establish a cooperative order if the planet was to escape an atomic World War III. In this provocative study, Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko show how the atomic bomb pushed the United States and the Soviet Union not toward cooperation but toward deep bipolar confrontation. Joseph Stalin, sure that the Americans meant to deploy their new weapon against Russia and defeat socialism, would stop at nothing to build his own bomb. Harry Truman, initially willing to consider cooperation, discovered that its pursuit would mean political suicide, especially when news of Soviet atomic spies reached the public. Both superpowers, moreover, discerned a new reality of the atomic age: now, cooperation must be total. The dangers posed by the bomb meant that intermediate measures of international cooperation would protect no one. Yet no two nations in history were less prepared to pursue total cooperation than were the United States and the Soviet Union. The logic of the bomb pointed them toward immediate Cold War. “Sprightly and well-argued…. The complicated history of how the bomb influenced the start of the war has never been explored so well."—Lloyd Gardner, Rutgers University “An outstanding new interpretation of the origins of the Cold War that gives equal weight to American and Soviet perspectives on the conflict that shaped the contemporary world.”—Geoffrey Roberts, author of Stalin’s Wars

The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947
The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947

Author: John Lewis Gaddis

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9780231122399

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This book moves beyond the focus on economic considerations that was central to the work of New Left historians, examining the many other forces--domestic politics, bureaucratic inertia, quirks of personality, and perceptions of Soviet intentions--that influenced key decision makers in Washington.

Atomic Americans
Atomic Americans

Author: Sarah E. Robey

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2022-03-15

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 1501762109

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At the dawn of the Atomic Age, Americans encountered troubling new questions brought about by the nuclear revolution: In a representative democracy, who is responsible for national public safety? How do citizens imagine themselves as members of the national collective when faced with the priority of individual survival? What do nuclear weapons mean for transparency and accountability in government? What role should scientific experts occupy within a democratic government? Nuclear weapons created a new arena for debating individual and collective rights. In turn, they threatened to destabilize the very basis of American citizenship. As Sarah E. Robey shows in Atomic Americans, people negotiated the contours of nuclear citizenship through overlapping public discussions about survival. Policymakers and citizens disagreed about the scale of civil defense programs and other public safety measures. As the public learned more about the dangers of nuclear fallout, critics articulated concerns about whether the federal government was operating in its citizens' best interests. By the early 1960s, a significant antinuclear movement had emerged, which ultimately contributed to the 1963 nuclear testing ban. Atomic Americans tells the story of a thoughtful body politic engaged in rewriting the rubric of rights and responsibilities that made up American citizenship in the Atomic Age.

The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy
The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy

Author: Matthew Kroenig

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-01-25

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0190849193

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For decades, the reigning scholarly wisdom about nuclear weapons policy has been that the United States only needs the ability to absorb an enemy nuclear attack and still be able to respond with a devastating counterattack. So long as the US, or any other nation, retains such an assured retaliation capability, no sane leader would intentionally launch a nuclear attack against it, and nuclear deterrence will hold. According to this theory, possessing more weapons than necessary for a second-strike capability is illogical. This argument is reasonable, but, when compared to the empirical record, it raises an important puzzle. Empirically, we see that the United States has always maintained a nuclear posture that is much more robust than a mere second-strike capability. In The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy, Matthew Kroenig challenges the conventional wisdom and explains why a robust nuclear posture, above and beyond a mere second-strike capability, contributes to a state's national security goals. In fact, when a state has a robust nuclear weapons force, such a capability reduces its expected costs in a war, provides it with bargaining leverage, and ultimately enhances nuclear deterrence. This book provides a novel theoretical explanation for why military nuclear advantages translate into geopolitical advantages. In so doing, it helps resolve one of the most-intractable puzzles in international security studies. Buoyed by an innovative thesis and a vast array of historical and quantitative evidence, The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy will force scholars to reconsider their basic assumptions about the logic of nuclear deterrence.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1988-07

Total Pages: 56

ISBN-13:

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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the premier public resource on scientific and technological developments that impact global security. Founded by Manhattan Project Scientists, the Bulletin's iconic "Doomsday Clock" stimulates solutions for a safer world.