background needed to make informed choices about nuclear technologies, introducing concepts that can be used for evaluating the claims of both proponents and opponents

An authoritative and unbiased guide to nuclear technology and the controversies that surround it. Are you for nuclear power or against it? What's the basis of your opinion? Did you know a CT scan gives you some 2 millisieverts of radiation? Do you know how much a millisievert is? Does irradiation make foods safer or less safe? What is the point of a bilateral Russia-US nuclear weapons treaty in a multipolar world? These are nuclear questions that call for nuclear choices, and this book equips citizens to make these choices informed ones. It explains, clearly and accessibly, the basics of nuclear technology and describes the controversies surrounding its use.

“An excellent contribution to the debate on the future role of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence in American foreign policy.” ―Contemporary Security Policy This book is a counter to the conventional wisdom that the United States can and should do more to reduce both the role of nuclear weapons in its security strategies and the number of weapons in its arsenal. The case against nuclear weapons has been made on many grounds—including historical, political, and moral. But, Brad Roberts argues, it has not so far been informed by the experience of the United States since the Cold War in trying to adapt deterrence to a changed world, and to create the conditions that would allow further significant changes to U.S. nuclear policy and posture. Drawing on the author’s experience in the making and implementation of U.S. policy in the Obama administration, this book examines that real-world experience and finds important lessons for the disarmament enterprise. Central conclusions of the work are that other nuclear-armed states are not prepared to join the United States in making reductions, and that unilateral steps by the United States to disarm further would be harmful to its interests and those of its allies. The book ultimately argues in favor of patience and persistence in the implementation of a balanced approach to nuclear strategy that encompasses political efforts to reduce nuclear dangers along with military efforts to deter them. “Well-researched and carefully argued.” ―Foreign Affairs

An authoritative and unbiased guide to nuclear technology and the controversies that surround it. Are you for nuclear power or against it? What's the basis of your opinion? Did you know a CT scan gives you some 2 millisieverts of radiation? Do you know how much a millisievert is? Does irradiation make foods safer or less safe? What is the point of a bilateral Russia-US nuclear weapons treaty in a multipolar world? These are nuclear questions that call for nuclear choices, and this book equips citizens to make these choices informed ones. It explains, clearly and accessibly, the basics of nuclear technology and describes the controversies surrounding its use.

In The Fragile Balance of Terror, the foremost experts on nuclear policy and strategy offer insight into an era rife with more nuclear powers. Some of these new powers suffer domestic instability, others are led by pathological personalist dictators, and many are situated in highly unstable regions of the world—a volatile mix of variables. The increasing fragility of deterrence in the twenty-first century is created by a confluence of forces: military technologies that create vulnerable arsenals, a novel information ecosystem that rapidly transmits both information and misinformation, nuclear rivalries that include three or more nuclear powers, and dictatorial decision making that encourages rash choices. The nuclear threats posed by India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea are thus fraught with danger. The Fragile Balance of Terror, edited by Vipin Narang and Scott D. Sagan, brings together a diverse collection of rigorous and creative scholars who analyze how the nuclear landscape is changing for the worse. Scholars, pundits, and policymakers who think that the spread of nuclear weapons can create stable forms of nuclear deterrence in the future will be forced to think again. Contributors: Giles David Arceneaux, Mark S. Bell, Christopher Clary, Peter D. Feaver, Jeffrey Lewis, Rose McDermott, Nicholas L. Miller, Vipin Narang, Ankit Panda, Scott D. Sagan, Caitlin Talmadge, Heather Williams, Amy Zegart

This collection of essays, unlike other books on this subject, emphasizes strategic, technological, and economic factors. It includes contributions from a combination of academics and governmental experts from both the United States and India. Nuclear India in the Twenty-First Century provides an important picture of India's nuclear intentions and capabilities and should facilitate policies that the US may consider in response to regional and global proliferation.

For more than forty years, the United States has maintained a public commitment to nuclear disarmament, and every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama has gradually reduced the size of America's nuclear forces. Yet even now, over two decades after the end of the Cold War, the United States maintains a huge nuclear arsenal on high alert and ready for war. The Americans, like the Russians, the Chinese, and other major nuclear powers, continue to retain a deep faith in the political and military value of nuclear force, and this belief remains enshrined at the center of U.S. defense policy regardless of the radical changes that have taken place in international politics. In No Use, national security scholar Thomas M. Nichols offers a lucid, accessible reexamination of the role of nuclear weapons and their prominence in U.S. security strategy. Nichols explains why strategies built for the Cold War have survived into the twenty-first century, and he illustrates how America's nearly unshakable belief in the utility of nuclear arms has hindered U.S. and international attempts to slow the nuclear programs of volatile regimes in North Korea and Iran. From a solid historical foundation, Nichols makes the compelling argument that to end the danger of worldwide nuclear holocaust, the United States must take the lead in abandoning unrealistic threats of nuclear force and then create a new and more stable approach to deterrence for the twenty-first century.

This book relates a complex ethical (re)assessment of the continued reliance by some states on nuclear weapons as instruments of state power. This (re)assessment is more urgent considering the relatively recent intensification of great power conflict dynamics and the nuclear-weapon states’ recommitments to modernizing, augmenting, or tailoring their nuclear forces to address vital state and alliance interests. And, especially since the beginning of the administration of U.S. President Donald J. Trump, these recommitments have accelerated the degree to which the political and moral dilemmas of (the threat of) nuclear use define and intensify existential risks for specific states and the international community at large. To execute this (re)assessment, this book details how strategic, political, legal, and moral reasoning are deeply intertwined on the questions of vital state and global values. Its ontological assumptions are taken from a broadly construed IR Constructivist stance, and its epistemological approach applies non-ideal moral principles informed by Kantian thought to selected problems of nuclear-armed security competition as they evolved since President Barack Obama’s 2009 Prague Declaration. This non-ideal moral approach employed is committed to the view that the dual imperatives of humanity’s survival and the common security of states requires an international order which privileges considerations of justice over power-political considerations. This non-ideal moral approach is a necessary element of theorizing a set of practices to effectively address the challenges and dilemmas of reordering international politics in terms of justice.

The first accessible book to discuss all aspects of nuclear power to help combat climate change and lethal air pollution.

Discussions of key domestic and international aspects of missile defense, arms control, and arms races.