The early 1980s were a tense time. The nuclear arms race was escalating, Reagan administration officials bragged about winning a nuclear war, and superpower diplomatic relations were at a new low. Nuclear war was a real possibility and antinuclear activism surged. By 1982 the Nuclear Freeze campaign had become the largest peace movement in American history. In support, celebrities, authors, publishers, and filmmakers saturated popular culture with critiques of Reagan's arms buildup, which threatened to turn public opinion against the president. Alarmed, the Reagan administration worked to co- opt the rhetoric of the nuclear freeze and contain antinuclear activism. Recently declassified White House memoranda reveal a concerted campaign to defeat activists' efforts. In this book, William M. Knoblauch examines these new sources, as well as the influence of notable personalities like Carl Sagan and popular culture such as the film The Day After, to demonstrate how cultural activism ultimately influenced the administration's shift in rhetoric and, in time, its stance on the arms race.

As a new administration reshapes American security policy, a leading scholar of U.S. foreign relations and national security reviews the most critical problems facing the Middle East, and the United States policy and actions to address them.

With the advent of the Trump Administration, relations between Iran and the United States have become increasingly conflictual to the point that a future war between the two countries is a realistic possibility. President Trump has unilaterally withdrawn the US from the historic Iran nuclear accord and has re-imposed the nuclear-related sanctions, which had been removed as a result of that accord. Reflecting a new determined US effort to curb Iran's hegemonic behavior throughout the Middle East, Trump's Iran policy has all the markings of a sharp discontinuity in the Iran containment strategy of the previous six US administrations. The regime change policy, spearheaded by a hawkish cabinet with a long history of antipathy toward the Iranian government, has become the most salient feature of US policy toward Iran under President Trump. This turn in US foreign policy has important consequences not just for Iran but also for Iran's neighbors and prospects of long-term stability in the Persian Gulf and beyond. This book seeks to examine the fluid dynamic of US-Iran relations in the Trump era by providing a social scientific understanding of the pattern of hostility and antagonism between Washington and Tehran and the resulting spiraling conflict that may lead to a disastrous war in the region.

Despite deep roots in local community organizing and peace activism, the peacebuilding field over the past two decades has evolved into a stratified, and often disconnected, community of academics, policymakers, and practitioners. While the growth into a more recognized and professionalized field has led to significant improvements in how decision-makers and influential thinkers accept peace and conflict resolution theory and practice, it has also left certain communities behind. Individual activists, community-based groups, and locally-led civil society organizations - in other words, the people most directly experiencing the results of violent conflict and striving to overcome and transform it - remain notably on the margins of what has become the more recognized "international peacebuilding field." As a result, the inherent links between policies and practices of the global North, particularly the United States, where much of the professional peacebuilding community is concentrated, and the daily realities of rising violence and collapsing order experienced by communities in the global South, are glossed over or apportioned to the fields of political science or international affairs. Similarly, the daily community level efforts of people and groups within the United States and other global North countries seeking to address drivers of violence and injustice in their own communities are largely disconnected from the struggles of communities living inside recognized war zones for a more peaceful and just future. These disconnects within the peacebuilding field have increasingly become obstacles to its further evolution and improvement. Without a serious shift in direction toward more integrated, interconnected, and intersectional understanding and approaches, the peacebuilding field threatens to become just another Western-driven industry in which powerful decision-makers, politicized funding, and large international bureaucracies sustain themselves. Reconnecting the field with its roots of community-based activism, organizing, and courageous leadership is urgently needed, and a necessary step to improving our collective efforts to build a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world. Drawing on the voices and experiences of community-based peace leaders around the world, this book envisions a new way of working together as a truly local and global peacebuilding field - one in which undoing the roots of violence and injustice is not something that takes place "in the field", but in the streets of our own neighborhoods and in solidarity with others around the world.

Cyberwarfare, like the seismic shift of policy with nuclear warfare, is modifying warfare into non-war warfare. A few distinctive characteristics of cyberwar emerge. Cyberwarfare has blurred the distinction between adversary and ally. Cyber probes continuously occur between allies and enemies alike, causing cyberespionage to merge with warfare. Espionage, as old as war itself, has technologically merged with acts of cyberwar as states threaten each other with prepositioned malware in each other's cyberespionage probed infrastructure. These two cyber shifts to warfare are agreed upon and followed by the US, Russia and China. What is not agreed upon in this shifting era of warfare are the policies upon which cyberwarfare is based. This book charts the policies in three key actors and navigates the futures of policy on an international stage.

The Nuclear Scholars Initiative is a signature program ran by the Project on Nuclear Issues (PONI)-to engage emerging nuclear experts in thoughtful and informed debate over how to best address the nuclear community's most pressing problems. The papers included in this volume comprise research from participants in the 2019 Nuclear Scholars Initiative. These papers explore a variety of topics such as the future of arms-control treaties, the role of artificial intelligence and cyber resilience in nuclear security, and the role of regional dynamics in nuclear security.

This book examines President Reagan's and his administration's efforts to mobilize public and congressional support for seven of the president's controversial foreign policy initiatives. Each chapter deals with a distinct foreign policy issue, but they each is related in one way or another to alleged threats to U.S. national security interests by the Soviet Union and its allies. When taken together these case studies clearly illustrate the book's larger thrust: a challenge to the conventional wisdom that Reagan was the indisputable "Great Communicator." This book contests the accepted wisdom that Reagan was an exemplary and highly effective practitioner of the going public model of presidential communication and leadership, that the bargaining model was relatively unimportant during his administration, and that the so-called public diplomacy regime was a high-value addition to the administration's public communication assets. The author employs an analytical approach to the historical record, draws on several academic disciplines and grounds his arguments in extensive archival and empirical research. The book concludes that the public communication efforts of the Reagan administration in the field of foreign policy were neither exceptionally skillful nor notably successful, that the public diplomacy regime had more negative than positive impact, that the going public model had minimal utility in the president's efforts to sell his foreign policy initiatives, and that the executive bargaining model played a central role in Reagan's governing strategy and essentially defined his presidential leadership role in the area of foreign policy making. This study vividly demonstrates the enormous gap between the real-word Reagan and the one that often exists in public mythology.

Exploring what we know - and don't know - about how nuclear weapons shape American grand strategy and international relations.The world first confronted the power of nuclear weapons when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The global threat of these weapons deepened in the following decades as more advanced weapons, aggressive strategies, and new nuclear powers emerged. Ever since, countless books, reports, and articles - and even a new field of academic inquiry called 'security studies' - have tried to explain the so-called nuclear revolution. Francis J. Gavin argues that scholarly and popular understanding of many key issues about nuclear weapons is incomplete at best and wrong at worst. Among these important, misunderstood issues are: how nuclear deterrence works; whether nuclear coercion is effective; how and why the United States chose its nuclear strategies; why countries develop their own nuclear weapons or choose not to do so; and, most fundamentally, whether nuclear weapons make the world safer or more dangerous. These and similar questions still matter because nuclear danger is returning as a genuine threat. Emerging technologies and shifting great-power rivalries seem to herald a new type of cold war just three decades after the end of the U.S.-Soviet conflict that was characterized by periodic prospects of global Armageddon. Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy helps policymakers wrestle with the latest challenges. Written in a clear, accessible, and jargon-free manner, the book also offers insights for students, scholars, and others interested in both the history and future of nuclear danger.

The US has embarked on a military adventure, "a long war", which threatens the future of humanity. US-NATO weapons of mass destruction are portrayed as instruments of peace. Mini-nukes are said to be "harmless to the surrounding civilian population". Pre-emptive nuclear war is portrayed as a "humanitarian undertaking". While one can conceptualise the loss of life and destruction resulting from present-day wars including Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using "new technologies" and advanced weapons, until it occurs and becomes a reality. The international community has endorsed nuclear war in the name of world peace. "Making the world safer" is the justification for launching a military operation which could potentially result in a nuclear holocaust. Nuclear war has become a multi-billion dollar undertaking, which fills the pockets of US defence contractors. What is at stake is the outright "privatisation of nuclear war". The Pentagon's global military design is one of world conquest. The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the world simultaneously. Central to an understanding of war, is the media campaign which grants it legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion. A good versus evil dichotomy prevails. The perpetrators of war are presented as the victims. Public opinion is misled. Breaking the "big lie", which upholds war as a humanitarian undertaking, means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force. This profit-driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies. The object of this book is to forcefully reverse the tide of war, challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corporate lobby groups which support them.

The Control Agenda is a sweeping account of the history of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), their rise in the Nixon and Ford administrations, their downfall under President Carter, and their powerful legacies in the Reagan years and beyond. Matthew Ambrose pays close attention to the interplay of diplomacy, domestic politics, and technology, and finds that the SALT process was a key point of reference for arguments regarding all forms of Cold War decision making. Ambrose argues elite U.S. decision makers used SALT to better manage their restive domestic populations and to exert greater control over the shape, structure, and direction of their nuclear arsenals. Ambrose also asserts that prolonged engagement with arms control issues introduced dynamic effects into nuclear policy. Arms control considerations came to influence most areas of defense decision making, while the measure of stability SALT provided allowed the examination of new and potentially dangerous nuclear doctrines. The Control Agenda makes clear that verification and compliance concerns by the United States prompted continuous reassessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions; assessments that later undergirded key U.S. policy changes toward the Soviet Union. Through SALT's many twists and turns, accusations and countercharges, secret backchannels and propaganda campaigns the specter of nuclear conflict loomed large.

Now facing a genuinely unprecedented configuration of existential threats, Israel's leaders must decide whether to continue their deliberate nuclear ambiguity policy (the "bomb in the basement") as they consider such urgent and overlapping survival issues as regional nuclear proliferation, Jihadist terror-group intersections with enemy states, rationality or irrationality of state and sub-state adversaries, assassination or "targeted killing," preemption, and the probable effects of a "Cold War II" between Russia and the United States. Israel must develop a strategic posture that will involve a suitably coherent and refined nuclear strategy. This book critically examines Israel's rapidly evolving nuclear strategy in light of these issues and explains how it underscores the overarching complexity of strategic interactions in the Middle East.