Performing Nuclear Weapons

Download or read book Performing Nuclear Weapons written by Paul Beaumont and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-07-23 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the UK’s nuclear weapon policy, focusing in particular on how consecutive governments have managed to maintain the Trident weapon system. The question of why states maintain nuclear weapons typically receives short shrift: its security, of course. The international is a perilous place, and nuclear weapons represent the ultimate self-help device. This book seeks to unsettle this complacency by re-conceptualizing nuclear weapon-armed states as nuclear regimes of truth and refocusing on the processes through which governments produce and maintain country-specific discourses that enable their continued possession of nuclear weapons. Illustrating the value of studying nuclear regimes of truth, the book conducts a discourse analysis of the UK’s nuclear weapons policy between 1980 and 2010. In so doing, it documents the sheer imagination and discursive labour required to sustain the positive value of nuclear weapons within British politics, as well as providing grounds for optimism regarding the value of the recent treaty banning nuclear weapons.

Download or read book Seeking the Bomb written by Vipin Narang and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first systematic look at the different strategies that states employ in their pursuit of nuclear weapons Much of the work on nuclear proliferation has focused on why states pursue nuclear weapons. The question of how states pursue nuclear weapons has received little attention. Seeking the Bomb is the first book to analyze this topic by examining which strategies of nuclear proliferation are available to aspirants, why aspirants select one strategy over another, and how this matters to international politics. Looking at a wide range of nations, from India and Japan to the Soviet Union and North Korea to Iraq and Iran, Vipin Narang develops an original typology of proliferation strategies—hedging, sprinting, sheltered pursuit, and hiding. Each strategy of proliferation provides different opportunities for the development of nuclear weapons, while at the same time presenting distinct vulnerabilities that can be exploited to prevent states from doing so. Narang delves into the crucial implications these strategies have for nuclear proliferation and international security. Hiders, for example, are especially disruptive since either they successfully attain nuclear weapons, irrevocably altering the global power structure, or they are discovered, potentially triggering serious crises or war, as external powers try to halt or reverse a previously clandestine nuclear weapons program. As the international community confronts the next generation of potential nuclear proliferators, Seeking the Bomb explores how global conflict and stability are shaped by the ruthlessly pragmatic ways states choose strategies of proliferation.

Download or read book United States Nuclear Tests written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This document lists chronologically and alphabetically by name all nuclear tests and simultaneous detonations conducted by the United States from July 1945 through September 1992. Two nuclear weapons that the United States exploded over Japan ending World War II are not listed. These detonations were not "tests" in the sense that they were conducted to prove that the weapon would work as designed (as was the first test near Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945), or to advance nuclear weapon design, or to determine weapons effects, or to verify weapon safety as were the more than one thousand tests that have taken place since June 30,1946. The nuclear weapon (nicknamed "Little Boy") dropped August 6,1945 from a United States Army Air Force B-29 bomber (the Enola Gay) and detonated over Hiroshima, Japan had an energy yield equivalent to that of 15,000 tons of TNT. The nuclear weapon (virtually identical to "Fat Man") exploded in a similar fashion August 9, 1945 over Nagaski, Japan had a yield of 21,000 tons of TNT. Both detonations were intended to end World War II as quickly as possible. Data on United States tests were obtained from, and verified by, the U.S. Department of Energy's three weapons laboratories -- Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California; and Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico; and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Additionally, data were obtained from public announcements issued by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and its successors, the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration, and the U.S. Department of Energy, respectively.

Download or read book The Five Series Study written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2000-03-02 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 200,000 U.S. military personnel participated in atmospheric nuclear weapons tests between 1945 and the 1963 Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Questions persist, such as whether that test participation is associated with the timing and causes of death among those individuals. This is the report of a mortality study of the approximately 70,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen who participated in at least one of five selected U.S. nuclear weapons test series1 in the 1950s and nearly 65,000 comparable nonparticipants, the referents. The investigation described in this report, based on more than 5 million person-years of mortality follow-up, represents one of the largest cohort studies of military veterans ever conducted.

Download or read book Monitoring Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear-Explosive Materials written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2005-04-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, CISAC tackles the technical dimensions of a longstanding controversy: To what extent could existing and plausibly attainable measures for transparency and monitoring make possible the verification of all nuclear weaponsâ€"strategic and nonstrategic, deployed and nondeployedâ€"plus the nuclear-explosive components and materials that are their essential ingredients? The committee's assessment of the technical and organizational possibilities suggests a more optimistic conclusion than most of those concerned with these issues might have expected.

Download or read book The Tradition of Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons written by T.V. Paul and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-23 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, no state has unleashed nuclear weapons. What explains this? According to the author, the answer lies in a prohibition inherent in the tradition of non-use, a time-honored obligation that has been adhered to by all nuclear states—thanks to a consensus view that use would have a catastrophic impact on humankind, the environment, and the reputation of the user. The book offers an in-depth analysis of the nuclear policies of the U.S., Russia, China, the UK, France, India, Israel, and Pakistan and assesses the contributions of these states to the rise and persistence of the tradition of nuclear non-use. It examines the influence of the tradition on the behavior of nuclear and non-nuclear states in crises and wars, and explores the tradition's implications for nuclear non-proliferation regimes, deterrence theory, and policy. And it concludes by discussing the future of the tradition in the current global security environment.

Download or read book Nuclear Weapons Technology 101 for Policy Wonks written by Bruce Goodwin and published by . This book was released on 2021-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The making of policy for nuclear security requires a strong grasp of the associated technical matters. That grasp came naturally in the early decades of the nuclear era, when scientists and engineers were deeply engaged in policymaking. In more recent decades, the technical community has played a narrower role, one generally limited to implementing policies made by others. This narrower role has been accentuated by generational change in the technical community, as the scientists and engineers who conceived, built, and executed the programs that created the existing U.S. nuclear deterrent faded into history along with the long-term competition for technical improvements with the Soviet Union. There is thus today a clear need to impart to the new generation of nuclear policy experts the necessary technical context.That is the purpose of this paper. Specifically: to introduce a new generation of nuclear policy experts to the technical perspectives of a nuclear weapon designer, to explain the science and engineering of nuclear weapons for the policy generalist, to review the evolution of the U.S. approach to nuclear weapons design, to explain the main attributes of the existing U.S. nuclear stockpile, to explain the functions of the nuclear weapons complex, and how this all is integrated to sustain deterrence into the future.