The North Korean nuclear program is headed in a dangerous direction. Yet the United States and its allies have not set forth a coherent or unified strategy to stop it. This Task Force, sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, evaluates the challenges facing the United States in and around the Korean peninsula and assess American options for meeting them. The situation on the peninsula has deteriorated rapidly since October 2002, when North Korea admitted having a secret highly enriched uranium program that put it on course to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. North Korea has since withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, asserted it possess nuclear weapons, and declared that it is reprocessing its spent nuclear fuel. Having initially emphasized the need for a negotiated solution, North Korea's recent rhetoric has stressed the deterrent value of nuclear weapons. Co-chaired by Morton I. Abramowitz and James T. Laney, and directed by Council Senior Fellow Eric Heginbotham, the Task Force makes specific recommendations to help guide U.S. foreign policy: 1) articulate a strategy around which U.S. regional partners can rally; 2) as part of that strategy, engage in a serious negotiating effort with North Korea and test its intentions by proposing an interim agreement; 3) secure the commitment of U.S. allies to take tougher action should talks fail, 4) restore the health of the U.S.-ROK alliance; 5) persuade China to take greater responsibility for resolving the crisis; and 6) appoint a full-time high-level coordinator for Korea.

Wherever there have been nuclear weapons and nuclear fission, there have also been cameras. Camera Atomica explores the intimate relationship between photography and nuclear events, to uncover how the camera lens has shaped public perceptions of the atomic age and its anxieties. Photographs have a crucial place in the representation of the atomic age and its anxieties. Published in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario to coincide with a major exhibition there in 2014. Camera Atomica examines narratives beyond the "technological sublime" that dominates much nuclear photography, suppressing representations of the human form in favour of representations of B-52 bombers and mushroom clouds. The book proposes that the body is the site where the social environment interacts with the so-called "atomic road": uranium mining and processing, radiation research, nuclear reactor construction and operation, and weapons testing. Cameras have both recorded and - in certain instances - provided motivation for the production of nuclear events. Their histories and technological development are intimately intertwined. All photographs, including nuclear photographs, have the capability to function affectively by working on the emotions and fascinating audiences. Through a wide range of visual documentation, Camera Atomica raises questions such as: what has the role of photography been in underwriting a public image of the bomb and nuclear energy? Has the circulation of photographic images heightened or lessened anxieties, or done both at the same time? How should the different visual protocols of photography be understood?

This book, written with unique access to official archives, tells the secret story of Britain's H-bomb - the scientific and strategic background, the government's policy decision, the work of the remarkable men who created the bomb, the four weapon trials at a remote Pacific atoll in 1957-58, and the historic consequences.

Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Concise Edition

The closest most of us will ever come to being inside the Oval Office at a moment of crisis.

For sheer drama, this work of history may never be duplicated. The events of the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold in the actual words of President John F. Kennedy and his top advisers. Now available in a new, concise edition, this book retains its gripping sense of history in the making. 20 photographs.

"[A] splendid achievement, as powerful and exciting a book as one is likely to read this year...."—Barry Gewen, New York Times Book Review

"Gripping history."—Richard J. Tofel, Wall Street Journal

"[M]esmerizing. I was utterly fascinated....the best, fullest account of crisis yet and will remain so for decades to come."—Stephen E. Ambrose

"[A]s close as most people will ever get to being a fly on the wall during the discussions of leaders."—Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, James G. Blight

Containing the histories (from 1945 to the present) of the nuclear strategies of NATO, Britain and France, and of the defence preferences of the FRG (West Germany) this book shows how strategies were functions of a perceived Soviet threat and an American "nuclear guarantee". There were three options for West Europeans: a compromise with differing American needs in NATO, pursued by Britain and the FRG; national nuclear forces, developed by Britain and France; and projects for an independent European nuclear force.

In Resurrecting Nagasaki, Chad R. Diehl explores the genesis of narratives surrounding the atomic bombing of August 9, 1945, by following the individuals and groups who contributed to the shaping of Nagasaki City's postwar identity. Municipal officials, survivor-activist groups, the Catholic community, and American occupation officials all interpreted the destruction and reconstruction of the city from different, sometimes disparate perspectives. Diehl's analysis reveals how these atomic narratives shaped both the way Nagasaki rebuilt and the ways in which popular discourse on the atomic bombings framed the city's experience for decades.

This provocative book argues that the United States is paying a high price for its dominance in the emergence of new chemical, biological, and nuclear threats. America's growing military, economic, and cultural preeminence motivates states to oppose American power through whatever means possible. Rogue states and terrorists can now obtain the technology to develop weapons of mass destruction. Only with the active cooperation of other states, especially U.N. Security Council members Russia, China, and France, can this threat be stopped. To get this cooperation, the United States will have to give up its " prompt retaliatory" nuclear war plans that if combined with needed limited antiballistic missile defenses, would give the United States a de facto nuclear first-strike capability and therefore absolute military dominance. The Price of Dominance recommends an integrated program of strategy, policy, arms control negotiations, and nuclear deployments to foster the necessary cooperation while retaining strong nuclear deterrence as the foundation of American security strategy.

This timely book contains excerpts from authoritative testimony, speeches and reports of political leaders, members of Congress, and leading experts who lay out a roadmap for understanding the nation's growing concern and response to the threat of super terrorism. It highlights warnings on the domestic and international threat form reports of the Bremer Commission, Gilmore Commission, Hart-Rudman Commission, Baker-Cutler Report and the USS Cole Commission. The text features statements and assessments of Madeleine Albright, Ahmed Al-Fadl, Ken Alibek, Seth Carus, Bill Clinton, Anthony Cordesman, John Deutch, Louis Freeh, Donald Henderson, Joshua Lederberg, Sam Nunn, John Parachini, Janet Reno, George Tenet and others. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.

The story of the twentieth century is largely the story of the power of science and technology. Within that story is the incredible tale of the human conflict between three men-Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller-the scientists most responsible for the advent of weapons of mass destruction. How did science, enlisted in the service of the state during the Second World War, become a slave to its patron during the Cold War-and scientists with it? The story of these three men, is fundamentally about loyalty-to the country, to science, and to each other-and about the wrenching choices that had to be made when these allegiances came into conflict.

Gregg Herken gives us the behind-the-scenes account based upon a decade of research, interviews, and new documents. Brotherhood of the Bomb is a vital slice of American history told authoritatively-and grippingly-for the first time.

Shedding important new light on the history of the Cold War, Philip Nash tells the story of what the United States gave up to help end the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. By drawing on documents only recently declassified, he shows that one of President Kennedy's compromises with the Soviets involved the removal of Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey, an arrangement concealed from both the American public and the rest of the NATO allies. Nash traces the entire history of the Jupiters and explores why the United States offered these nuclear missiles, which were capable of reaching targets in the Soviet Union, to its European allies after the launch of Sputnik. He argues that, despite their growing doubts, both Eisenhower and Kennedy proceeded with the deployment of the missiles because they felt that cancellation would seriously damage America's credibility with its allies and the Soviet Union. The Jupiters subsequently played a far more significant role in Khrushchev's 1962 decision to deploy his missiles in Cuba, in U.S. deliberations during the ensuing missile crisis, and in the resolution of events in Cuba than most existing histories have supposed.

Based on fieldwork at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - the facility that designed the neutron bomb and the warhead for the MX missile - "Nuclear Rites" takes the reader deep inside the top-secret culture of a nuclear weapons lab. Exploring the scientists' world of dark humor, ritualized secrecy, and disciplined emotions, anthropologist Hugh Gusterson uncovers the beliefs and values that animate their work. He discovers that many of the scientists are Christians, deeply convinced of the morality of their work, and a number are liberals who opposed the Vietnam War and the Reagan-Bush agenda. Gusterson also examines the anti-nuclear movement, concluding that the scientists and protesters are alike in surprising ways, with both cultures reflecting the hopes and anxieties of an increasingly threatened middle class. In a lively, wide-ranging account, Gusterson analyzes the ethics and politics of laboratory employees, the effects of security regulations on the scientists' private lives, and the role of nuclear tests - beyond the obvious scientific one - as rituals of initiation and transcendence. He shows how the scientists learn to identify in an almost romantic way with the power of the machines they design - machines they do not fear. In the 1980s the 'world behind the fence' was thrown into crisis by massive anti-nuclear protests at the gates of the lab and by the end of the Cold War. Gusterson links the emergence of the anti-nuclear movement to shifting gender roles and the development of postindustrial capitalism.

In 1982, with Cold War anxieties running high, A.G. Mojtabai set out for Amarillo, Texas, home of Pantex, the final assembly plant for all nuclear weapons in the United States. Through the lens of this particular city, she sought to focus on our adaptation as a nation to the threat of nuclear war. Her interviews began with Pantex workers assured of both the necessity and the safety of the work that they did, and in the steady, beneficent, advance of science. Working alongside them were fundamentalist Christians who believed in inevitable catastrophe, and who testified to quite another, blessed, assurance of Divine rescue from the holocaust to come. This startling juxtaposition of apocalyptic and technocratic world views was not confined to Pantex. Blessed Assurance brilliantly examines this clash of spiritual visions as it presented itself repeatedly in the streets, churches, and corporate offices of Amarillo. The voices that you hear in this book are those of the people of Amarillo speaking for themselves. Their narratives powerfully reveal their hopes and fears, their sense of the meaning of history, and the future of the human race. Blessed Assurance won the year's Lillian Smith Award for the best book about the South in 1986.

Keith Payne begins by asking, "Did we really learn how to deter predictably and reliably during the Cold War?" He answers cautiously in the negative, pointing out that we know only that our policies toward the Soviet Union did not fail. What we can be more certain of, in Payne's view, is that such policies will almost assuredly fail in the Second Nuclear Age -- a period in which direct nuclear threat between superpowers has been replaced by threats posed by regional "rogue" powers newly armed with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

The fundamental problem with deterrence theory is that is posits a rational -- hence predictable -- opponent. History frequently demonstrates the opposite. Payne argues that as the one remaining superpower, the United States needs to be more flexible in its approach to regional powers.

For forty years the Soviet-American nuclear arms race dominated world politics, yet the Soviet nuclear establishment was shrouded in secrecy. Now that the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union has collapsed, it is possible to answer questions that have intrigued policymakers and the public for years. How did the Soviet Union build its atomic and hydrogen bombs? What role did espionage play? How did the American atomic monopoly affect Stalin's foreign policy? What was the relationship between Soviet nuclear scientists and the country's political leaders? This spellbinding book answers these questions by tracing the history of Soviet nuclear policy from developments in physics in the 1920s to the testing of the hydrogen bomb and the emergence of nuclear deterrence in the mid-1950s. In engrossing detail, David Holloway tells how Stalin launched a crash atomic program only after the Americans bombed Hiroshima and showed that the bomb could be built; how the information handed over to the Soviets by Klaus Fuchs helped in the creation of their first bomb; how the scientific intelligentsia, which included such men as Andrei Sakharov, interacted with the police apparatus headed by the suspicious and menacing Lavrentii Beria; what steps Stalin took to counter U.S. atomic diplomacy; how the nuclear project saved Soviet physics and enabled it to survive as an island of intellectual autonomy in a totalitarian society; and what happened when, after Stalin's death, Soviet scientists argued that a nuclear war might extinguish all life on earth. This magisterial history throws light on Soviet policy at the height of the Cold War, illuminates a central but hitherto secret element of the Stalinist system, and puts into perspective the tragic legacy of this program today-environmental damage, a vast network of institutes and factories, and a huge stockpile of unwanted weapons.

Bruce Blair examines operational safety hazards for nuclear forces deployed on combat alert in Russia, the United States, and elsewhere. He provides new information on command and control procedures and deficiencies that affect the risks of accidental, unauthorized, or inadvertent use of nuclear weapons, particularly those in the former Soviet Union. Blair proposes changes in nuclear operations that would reduce these risks. Remedies range from eliminating targets from missiles to taking all nuclear forces off alert (" zero alert" ) so that no weapons are poised for immediate launch. In the " zero alert" scenario, missiles and bombers lack nuclear warheads or other vital components and require extensive preparations for redeployment. Blair assesses the effects of such measures on strategic deterrence and crisis stability in the event of a revival of nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia. He also describes the burdens of verification that his remedies impose. This book is the first in a series devoted to aspects of operational safety and nuclear weapons. Other topics in the series include joint U.S.- Russian missile attack early warning, ensuring the security of dismantled warheads and bomb materials, and command-control problems in the emerging nuclear states. Bruce G. Blair is a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program at Brookings and the author of numerous books, including The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Brookings, 1993).

Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers exchanged at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in the first and most legendary prisoner exchange between East and West? "Bridge of Spies" vividly traces their paths to that exchange on February 10, 1962, when their fate helped to define the conflicts and lethal undercurrents of the most dangerous years of the Cold War.
"Bridge of Spies" is the true story of three extraordinary characters - William Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, a British born KGB agent arrested by the FBI in New York City and jailed as a Soviet superspy for trying to steal America's most precious nuclear secrets; Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot who was captured when his plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission over the closed cities of central Russia; and Frederic Pryor, a young American graduate student in Berlin mistakenly identified as a spy, arrested and held without charge by the Stasi, East Germany's secret police.
By weaving the three strands of this story together for the first time, Giles Whittell masterfully portrays the intense political tensions and nuclear brinkmanship that brought the United States and Soviet Union so close to a hot war in the early 1960s. He reveals the dramatic lives of men drawn into the nadir of the Cold War by duty and curiosity, and the tragicomedy of errors that eventually induced Khrushchev to send missiles to Castro. Two of his subjects -- the spy and the pilot -- were the original seekers of weapons of mass destruction. The third, an intellectual, fluent in German, unencumbered by dependents, and researching a Ph.D. thesis on the foreign trade system of the Soviet bloc, seemed to the Stasi precisely the sort of person the CIA should have been recruiting. He was not. In over his head in the world capital of spying, he was wrongly charged with espionage and thus came to the Agency's notice by a more roundabout route. The three men were rescued against daunting odds by fate and by their families, and then all but forgotten. Yet they laid bare the pathological mistrust that fueled the arms race for the next 30 years.
Drawing on new interviews conducted in the United States, Europe and Russia with key players in the exchange and the events leading to it, among them Frederic Pryor himself and the man who shot down Gary Powers, "Bridge of Spies "captures a time when the fate of the world really did depend on coded messages on microdots and brave young men in pressure suits. The exchange that frigid day at two of the most sensitive points along the Iron Curtain represented the first step back from where the superpowers had stood since the building of the Berlin Wall the previous summer - on the brink of World War III.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Environmental tragedies such as Chernobyl and the "Exxon Valdez" remind us that catastrophic accidents are always possible in a world full of hazardous technologies. Yet, the "apparently" excellent safety record with nuclear weapons has led scholars, policy-makers, and the public alike to believe that nuclear arsenals can serve as a secure deterrent for the foreseeable future. In this provocative book, Scott Sagan challenges such optimism. Sagan's research into formerly classified archives penetrates the veil of safety that has surrounded U.S. nuclear weapons and reveals a hidden history of frightening "close calls" to disaster.

The proliferation of advanced weapons to volatile regions of the world has become a major issue in the post Cold War era. It was thought that no Third World nation could ever pose a technologically-based threat to the great powers by acquiring advanced weaponry. But this has proved to be wrong. The Persian Gulf War changed the worldwide perception of the spread of ballistic missiles to countries like Iraq. Access to a new type of weapon--cruise missiles--poses an even greater threat. With technology that is accessible, affordable, and relatively simple to produce, Third World countries could acquire highly accurate, long-range cruise missile forces to escalate local conflicts and threaten the forces and even the territories of the industrial powers. This book is a warning to policymakers. It is not too late to confront the realities of cruise missile proliferation and to devise international responses that could contain the worst possible consequences. Carus proposes a new regime of technology controls, security-building measures, and conflict resolution that need to be considered, and acted on, by policymakers and international relations experts everywhere.

The end of the cold war and the disintegration of the Soviet Union has not eliminated the threat posed to international security by nuclear weapons. The Soviet breakup actually created a new set of dangers: the accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons and the illicit transfer of nuclear warheads, technology, or expertise to the Third World. The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War analyzes the danger of nuclear inadvertence lurking in the command and control systems of the nuclear superpowers. Foreign policy expert Bruce G. Blair identifies the cold war roots of the contemporary risks and outlines a comprehensive policy agenda to strengthen control over nuclear forces. Based on discussions with numerous U.S. and Russian experts, including Russian launch officers who served in the strategic rocket forces and ballistic missile submarines, this book reveals a wealth of new facts about the hidden history of U.S. and Soviet nuclear crisis alerts and exercises. It is a richly detailed, rigorous, and authoritative account of nuclear operations and overturns much conventional wisdom on the subject.

Winner of the 1993 Ludwik Fleck Prize presented by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). Donald MacKenzie follows one line of technology - strategic ballistic missile guidance through a succession of weapons systems to reveal the workings of a world that is neither awesome nor unstoppable. He uncovers the parameters, the pressures, and the politics that make up the complex social construction of an equally complex technology. Donald MacKenzie is Reader in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh.

Drawing upon anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, and literature, this brilliant insight into why men go to war traces the changes that have occurred in weapons and tactics since prehistoric times. Robert O'Connell demonstrates how the technology unleashed during World War I made human qualities almost irrelevant to the conduct of war, until now, in the nuclear age, humanity has become subservient to the weapons it has made.

Robert Jervis argues here that the possibility of nuclear war has created a revolution in military strategy and international relations. He examines how the potential for nuclear Armageddon has changed the meaning of war, the psychology of statesmanship, and the formulation of military policy by the superpowers.

The nuclear freeze movement grew more quickly than even the most optimistic activists thought possible, as large numbers of Americans became convinced that there was something wrong with United States defense policy and that they could do something about it. This analysis provides the first comprehensive history of the nuclear freeze movement, approaching it from three distinct perspectives. Changes in the politics and policy of nuclear weapons created an opportunity for a dissident movement. Intermediating forces in American politics influenced the situation. The efforts of activists and organizations to build a protest movement and their interaction with American political institutions provide the third perspective. "A Winter of Discontent" addresses both the broad spectrum of movement activity and the political context surrounding it.

The text explores the challenge of the nuclear freeze movement to the content of United States national security policy and the policy making process. By analyzing the freeze, a theoretical framework for understanding the origins, development and potential political influence of other protest movements in the United States can be developed. The book also strives to integrate analysis of peace movements into an understanding of the policy context in which they emerge. This volume is essential for courses in social movements, strategic policy, American politics and political sociology. Antinuclear freeze activists and students of peace studies will also find this work invaluable.

A collection of essays on the nuclear revolution and the end of the Cold War by E. P. Thompson, Mike Davis, Raymond Williams, Rudolf Bahro, Lucio Magri, Etienne Balibar, Roy and Zhores Medvedev, John Cox, Saburo Kugai, Marcus Raskin, Noam Chomsky, Alan Wolfe, Mary Kaldorf and Fred Halliday.