Underground facilities are used extensively by many nations to conceal and protect strategic military functions and weapons' stockpiles. Because of their depth and hardened status, however, many of these strategic hard and deeply buried targets could only be put at risk by conventional or nuclear earth penetrating weapons (EPW). Recently, an engineering feasibility study, the robust nuclear earth penetrator program, was started by DOE and DOD to determine if a more effective EPW could be designed using major components of existing nuclear weapons. This activity has created some controversy about, among other things, the level of collateral damage that would ensue if such a weapon were used. To help clarify this issue, the Congress, in P.L. 107-314, directed the Secretary of Defense to request from the NRC a study of the anticipated health and environmental effects of nuclear earth-penetrators and other weapons and the effect of both conventional and nuclear weapons against the storage of biological and chemical weapons. This report provides the results of those analyses. Based on detailed numerical calculations, the report presents a series of findings comparing the effectiveness and expected collateral damage of nuclear EPW and surface nuclear weapons under a variety of conditions.

July 2019 Printed in BLACK AND WHITE The Army's Weapon Systems Handbook was updated in July 2019, but is still titled "Weapon Systems Handbook 2018." We are printing this in black and white to keep the price low. It presents many of the acquisition programs currently fielded or in development. The U.S. Army Acquisition Corps, with its 36,000 professionals, bears a unique responsibility for the oversight and systems management of the Army's acquisition lifecycle. With responsibility for hundreds of acquisition programs, civilian and military professionals collectively oversee research, development and acquisition activities totaling more than $20 billion in Fiscal Year 2016 alone. Why buy a book you can download for free? We print this so you don't have to. We at 4th Watch Publishing are former government employees, so we know how government employees actually use the standards. When a new standard is released, somebody has to print it, punch holes and put it in a 3-ring binder. While this is not a big deal for a 5 or 10-page document, many DoD documents are over 400 pages and printing a large document is a time- consuming effort. So, a person that's paid $25 an hour is spending hours simply printing out the tools needed to do the job. That's time that could be better spent doing mission. We publish these documents so you can focus on what you are there for. It's much more cost-effective to just order the latest version from Amazon.com. SDVOSB If there is a standard you would like published, let us know. Our web site is usgovpub.com

Part of a series examining the technology competition between security organizations and terrorist organizations, this report focuses on understanding how terrorist groups make technology choices and consequently how the United States can discourage their adoption of advanced conventional weapons. Five types of advanced conventional weapons are identified that could provide terrorists with a new and qualitatively different weapon capability: sniper rifles, squad-level weapons, antitank missiles, large limpet mines, and mortar systems. Two key methods of limiting the threat from these systems i.

Winner of the 2019 William E. Colby Award "The book I had been waiting for. I can't recommend it highly enough." —Bill Gates The era of autonomous weapons has arrived. Today around the globe, at least thirty nations have weapons that can search for and destroy enemy targets all on their own. Paul Scharre, a leading expert in next-generation warfare, describes these and other high tech weapons systems—from Israel’s Harpy drone to the American submarine-hunting robot ship Sea Hunter—and examines the legal and ethical issues surrounding their use. “A smart primer to what’s to come in warfare” (Bruce Schneier), Army of None engages military history, global policy, and cutting-edge science to explore the implications of giving weapons the freedom to make life and death decisions. A former soldier himself, Scharre argues that we must embrace technology where it can make war more precise and humane, but when the choice is life or death, there is no replacement for the human heart.

The authors assess alternatives for a next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) across a broad set of potential characteristics and situations. They use the current Minuteman III as a baseline to develop a framework to characterize alternative classes of ICBMs, assess the survivability and effectiveness of possible alternatives, and weigh those alternatives against their cost.

This Note addresses near-term development issues for an emerging class of weapons--long-range conventional missiles (LRCMs), defined as missiles capable of attacking targets with conventional (nonnuclear) munitions at ranges in excess of 500 kilometers. The author identifies useful roles for the LRCM and determines that technologies beyond those of the Tomahawk are both necessary and available. He recommends that the Navy focus its near-term development on an upgraded Tomahawk Block IV, while the Air Force moves toward a new LRCM design. He finds that LRCMs are fiscally affordable, and arms control regimes are being developed that address their political costs. However, institutional concerns may be the major stumbling block to LRCM development. Data and support systems needed for operating LRCMs are not currently available and will require institutional changes in the services and the intelligence community. The author makes recommendations for future technology and support policy decisions.

Air power doctrine is comprised of both a formal literature such as the Army's Field Manual lO0-2O, Command and Employment of Air Power (published during World War II), or today's Air Force Manual 1-1, Basic Aerospace Doctrine of the United States Air Force, and an informal and uncodified set of doctrinal perceptions that, although they are not in the official literature, affect the way our military forces do business. This second category, the unofficial doctrine, represents a sort of corporate consensus of "how we really do business" and is generally based on a combination of "real world" observations and political necessity. This study addressed just such an unofficial doctrine. A persistent legacy of the World War II era of strategic bombardment and the postwar requirement for nuclear deterrence is the association of long-range combat aircraft (bombers) with the strategic nuclear mission and, conversely, the assumption that the far more likely nonnuclear conflicts will be handled by the "tactical" elements of our aerospace forces, our fighters. This study offers a serious alternative to this "aerospace folklore." The proposals put forth here are based on the indivisible air power concept which suggests that strategic and tactical classifications are purely transitory and depend on how a weapon is used, not on its size, speed, range, payload, employment medium (space or air), or service or command affiliation. The doctrinal framework presented in this study, if applied to all our aerospace systems, should result in a far more flexible aerospace force structure, one that gets the most from our increasingly expensive and limited assets. More important, it should improve our ability to rapidly respond to global crisis and conflict and to apply the appropriate level of force at the right place and the right time.