In this briefing prepared for the 41st meeting of the Military Operations Research Society, the author challenges much of the current thinking behind U.S. arms control and strategic policies. He argues that counterforce capabilities should be sought, not eschewed or proscribed. He sees counterforce capabilities more as deterrents to conflict than as inducements to nuclear warfighting. Where some would embrace counterforce capabilities only as a retaliatory option, the author goes much further and advocates them as a credible, advantageous, first-strike initiative. He questions the generally accepted belief that counterforce capabilities are inherently destabilizing. Because of enduring asymmetries in vital interests and conventional force capabilities, the author argues that the United States, more than the Soviet Union, has a need for a credible and advantageous nuclear initiative.

Argues that counterforce and first-strike capabilities should be considered as important, even desirable, attributes for the U.S. strategic posture because of the Soviet preponderance in peacetime conventional forces.

The author takes issue with the complacent belief that a happy mixture of deterrence, arms control and luck will enable humanity to cope adequately with weapons of mass destruction, arguing that the risks are ever more serious.

U.S. security does not require nearly 1,600 nuclear weapons deployed on a triad of systems—bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs)—to deliver them. A new paper from Benjamin H. Friedman, Christopher A. Preble and Matt Fay encourages abandonment of the triad and skepticism about the received wisdom justifying U.S. nuclear weapons’ policies. The authors suggest that shifting to a submarine-based monad would serve U.S. deterrent needs and eventually save taxpayers roughly $20 billion a year.

A former design engineer for Lockheed presents a comprehensive survey of U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces and strategic doctrines that exposes the U.S. military's dangerous bid for "first strike" capability and describes corporate imperatives for perpetuating the arms race and circumventing arms control.

En undersøgelse af hvordan USA og USSR faktisk kunne føre atomkrig. De opstillede scenarier er taget fra computer på grundlag af uklassificeret materiale vedrørende supermagternes kernevåbenstyrker og potentielle by-, militær- og industrimål.