The purpose of this book is to provide graduate students, professional engineers, military officers, and weapons-systems planners with a comprehensive grounding in the technology, evolution, functions, costs, impacts on society, utility, and limi tations of modern strategic weapons systems. Since the subject is often left to the specialists, this work should introduce the general reader to the fundamentals of such systems in an informed manner. Nowadays the intense interaction of means and ends sym bolized by strategic weapons has stimulated a changing dis cipline in which new missile systems and the intricate logic of nuclear force and counterforce hold the stage alongside the truths of conflict, alliances, fears, games, and subtle gains and losses. Many readers with new personal interest or public responsibility in this complex field will require an overall guide to it. This book will not prepare the reader to become an expert in the vast subject of strategic weapons systems. It will, however, enable him to understand, evaluate, and form reasonable opinions about these systems, their capabilities and effective ness. The subject is dealt with more from the viewpoint of the user (investor) rather than the architect (systems engineer) and builder (design engineer). While the user will be concerned with both political as well as technical options which may be available to solve a problem, the systems and design engineers are concerned with analyzing and building technological weapons devices once their requirements are generally known.

Weaponry does not equal strategy, argues Colin Gray, but the two are often confused, resulting in such linguistic errors as strategic weapons. There may be an interactive relationship between policy, strategy and weaponry but, he contends, policy and strategy always take the front seat.

"Philosophy and science"--Jacket. Bibliography: p. [242]-257. Includes index.

The excellent quality and depth of the various essays make [the book] an invaluable resource....It is likely to become essential reading in its field.--CHOICE

This open access volume surveys the state of the field to examine whether a fifth wave of deterrence theory is emerging. Bringing together insights from world-leading experts from three continents, the volume identifies the most pressing strategic challenges, frames theoretical concepts, and describes new strategies. The use and utility of deterrence in today’s strategic environment is a topic of paramount concern to scholars, strategists and policymakers. Ours is a period of considerable strategic turbulence, which in recent years has featured a renewed emphasis on nuclear weapons used in defence postures across different theatres; a dramatic growth in the scale of military cyber capabilities and the frequency with which these are used; and rapid technological progress including the proliferation of long-range strike and unmanned systems. These military-strategic developments occur in a polarized international system, where cooperation between leading powers on arms control regimes is breaking down, states widely make use of hybrid conflict strategies, and the number of internationalized intrastate proxy conflicts has quintupled over the past two decades. Contemporary conflict actors exploit a wider gamut of coercive instruments, which they apply across a wider range of domains. The prevalence of multi-domain coercion across but also beyond traditional dimensions of armed conflict raises an important question: what does effective deterrence look like in the 21st century? Answering that question requires a re-appraisal of key theoretical concepts and dominant strategies of Western and non-Western actors in order to assess how they hold up in today’s world. Air Commodore Professor Dr. Frans Osinga is the Chair of the War Studies Department of the Netherlands Defence Academy and the Special Chair in War Studies at the University Leiden. Dr. Tim Sweijs is the Director of Research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Military Sciences of the Netherlands Defence Academy in Breda.

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