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William J. Perry was trained as a mathematician and has evolved into a prophet. The instrument of his transformation is, of course, the Bomb. This reviewer is incapable of assessing his memoir, My ...

Stability has been the holy grail of deterrence strategists since the outset of the US–Soviet nuclear-arms competition. This prize has been elusive because nuclear weapons are not stabilising.

Forecasting Nuclear Proliferation in the 21st Century: The Role of Theory (vol. 1, 312 pages, $24.95) and A Comparative Perspective (vol. 2, 488 pages, $24.95), edited by William C. Potter with Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova. Stanford University Press, 2010.

Even during periods of significant leverage, Washington has not had the power to stop and reverse Pakistan's nuclear trends. Pakistan's nuclear establishment has successfully deflected unwelcome US diplomatic initiatives and has been able to draw the line between necessary adaptation to, and rejection of, external pressures. Pakistan's national security managers clearly perceive that Washington's highest priorities in bilateral relations relate to the US military campaign in Afghanistan and efforts to combat terrorist groups with global reach. They presume that nuclear issues will continue to take a backseat to ongoing military campaigns in which Pakistan's assistance is crucial for America's success. This correlation of pressure and response might well change if Pakistan's nuclear activities again become front-page news. Absent this, US-Pakistani relations do not lend themselves to effective, near-term suasion by Washington on nuclear issues, whether via the 2010 US Nuclear Posture Review or other means....

The earliest years of offsetting nuclear weapon capabilities between rivals can be the most harrowing. India and Pakistan have certainly followed this pattern. But over time, rivals can moderate their competition, especially with regard to nuclear weapons. Formal arms control treaties, like those negotiated between the United States and the Soviet Union, are unlikely for southern Asia. India and Pakistan can, however, employ tacit agreements, confidence-building, and nuclear risk-reduction measures to allay mutual concerns over nuclear weapons. Forward progress on this agenda will likely be constrained by extremist acts linked to Pakistan and political instability there.

In the autumn 2007 issue of Survival, Ashley J. Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argued that China's recent anti-satellite weapons test was part of a considered strategy des...

Now that the United States has given India a free pass around nuclear controls, other states will be lining up to profit from proliferation.

The prospect for an arms race figures prominently in the arguments of boosters and detractors of space warfare. However, the most likely outcome of U.S. plans to place weapons in space is not an arms race, but a further degradation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and an increase in weapons proliferation. Both China and Russia are likely to respond to any U.S. space weapons with inexpensive space weapons and a cessation of cooperative nonproliferation programs. During the Cold War, space warfare was avoided because of the detrimental effects such weapons would have on the physical and political environment. Today, these same effects can be seen through the prism of proliferation.

Something is clearly different in Kashmir today. Although Pakistan's moves this winter can be interpreted either as tactical maneuvers or the early manifestations of fundamental reassessment, the situation is unusually fluid. Clearly, important opportunities exist.

For ten months between late December 2001 and October 2002, India and Pakistan kept approximately 1 million soldiers in a high state of readiness along their international border (IB) and the Line of Control (LoC) dividing Kashmir, raising the specter of conflict. The immediate trigger for the deployment was a brazen attack by militants on the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi on December 13, 2001. The attack set in motion an extended crisis with two distinct peaks, when tensions were extremely high and when war appeared imminent to many observers. The first peak, immediately after the attack on parliament, occurred in the December 2001-January 2002 time frame. The second peak, in May–June 2002, followed another high-profile attack by militants, this time near the town of Kaluchak in Jammu. During both peaks of the crisis, high-level U.S. officials were deeply involved in crisis management, seeking to avoid war and to secure the return of Indian and Pakistani forces to their cantonments. This is the story of the Bush administration’s crisis management effort, as told by over two dozen individuals who helped shape or who led the U.S. diplomatic response during the extended crisis.2

Publisher Summary According to the chapter, a Code of Conduct is responsible for space-faring nations that could provide valuable near-term results in further mitigating space debris and in minimizing the likelihood of further anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon tests in space. A Code of Conduct clarifying responsible space-faring activities might also usefully include provisions regarding space traffic management, consultation arrangements, and sharing information. The Code of Conduct also reveals many forms, including bilateral or multilateral arrangements between or among space-faring nations. It could be drawn up by major space-faring nations in an ad hoc body created especially for this purpose. Key features of a Code of Conduct might be developed in the Conference on Disarmament (CD) or the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS). However, the chapter conveys the argument for a greater sense of urgency in proceeding, rather than for a particular way to proceed. The option for sufficient support for a Code of Conduct, where the interested parties can devise an appropriate work plan to make this concept a reality is discussed herein.

Contents Preface xxx Acknowledgments xxx 1 Master Builders and Deconstructionists 1 2 Apocalyptic Warnings 000 3 The First Nuclear Age 000 4 The Second Nuclear Age 000 5 Alternative Nuclear Futures 000 6 Finding Safe Passage in the Second Nuclear Age 000 Notes 000 Index 000

Some fragmentary avenues concerning the various modes of causality whereby financialization has managed to permeate society will be briefly explored here. Perhaps the most powerful and fundamental process analysed here is the slow maturation of ideas. It took more than two centuries for the efficiency ethos to become the dominant, unquestioned paradigm and world view in the modern era. Our first priority for action should therefore be to resist this paradigm’s attempt to monopolize meaning — for meaning is first and foremost a question of ends, and only then of means. The aim, then, is not to make financialization more moral, but to make it subservient to ends that respect human dignity and human nature.

(1991). Reflections on the New World Order. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Vol. 47, New World Order, pp. 19-37.

With the end of the Cold War, Asia has replaced Europe as the region most likely to be roiled by prospective U.S. missile defense deployments.1 While European capitals remain uncomfortable with American impulses to construct a national missile shield, these concerns pale in comparison to the 1980s, when Moscow employed intense coercive diplomacy and military bluster trying to block President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Back then, hundreds of thousands of street demonstrators rallied across Europe against the “Star Wars” program. In contrast, President George W Bush’s decisions to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and fast-track national missile defenses produced a muted response in Europe. This time around, Moscow’s diplomatic and military options were quite limited, with the Kremlin’s defense budget in 2002 barely one-twelfth that of the United States. If European misgivings rise again, the most likely cause will be overreaching by Washington rather than posturing by Moscow.

Nuclear risk reduction during the Cold War was a high priority and constant preoccupation of U.S. and Soviet leaders.1 Over the course of three decades, Washington and Moscow worked hard to put in place nine key elements to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. Despite sustained, high-level efforts to prevent a nuclear exchange and reduce nuclear dangers, U.S. and Soviet leaders experienced several close calls and barely avoided potentially catastrophic accidents.

Government officials, military strategists, and the general public generally reacted to the atomic bomb by concluding that a defense against this fearsome weapon would be utterly futile. While other European and Japanese cities were leveled by air campaigns during the war, the economical means by which Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed came as a great shock. Tokyo was incinerated by 279 planes and 1,667 tons of bombs; a single plane carrying one atomic bomb wreaked complete destruction on Hiroshima and three days later at Nagasaki.1 Few took issue with the sentiment expressed in Bernard Brodie’s influential collection of essays, The Ah so kite Weapon: “No adequate defense against the bomb exists, and the possibilities of its existence in the future are exceedingly remote.”2

The origins of strategic arms control—broadly defined as the effort I to limit the numbers, types, or disposition of weapons1—predated the Cold War. During the 1920s and 1930s, the United States, Great Britain, and Japan sought to fix quantitative and qualitative limits on naval combatants, which were the trans-oceanic means of striking targets of that era. The codification of these efforts in the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and the London Naval Treaty of 1930 were not central, however, to the geopolitics of the inter-war years. Nor were they very successful.

The Cold War strategy of containment was designed, in George Kennan’s original game plan, to hold the fort until Democracy JL ultimately triumphed over Communism.1 Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, was another vestige of the Cold War. It, too, was meant to check Soviet expansionism by clarifying that the use of force to change boundaries or allegiances in sensitive areas would entail intolerable risks. With the demise of the Soviet Union, containment became unnecessary and MAD lost its underpinnings. Vulnerability remains a post-Cold War fact of life, however, not simply from the destructive power of still-bloated nuclear arsenals, but also from new threats that are asymmetric in nature. Indeed, these two sets of vulnerabilities are intertwined, since asymmetric warriors could gain immense new powers from illicit transfers of weapons or dangerous materials out of the former Soviet Union.

The paradigm shift from Cold War to asymmetric warfare was widely I predicted prior to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Many prescient assessments by government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and advisory panels drawing on senior Republican and Democratic figures all warned of serious trouble ahead. This body of work concluded, with remarkably little variation, that the primary threats facing the United States after the Cold War were posed by weak foes that would exploit the vulnerabilities of a modern society while seeking to skirt U.S. military strengths. Terrorism—especially acts of terror utilizing weapons of mass destruction—was at the top of nearly every one of these threat assessments. Cold War-era dangers posed by ocean-spanning ballistic missiles were at or very near the bottom.

Treaties governing nuclear arms reduction and missile defenses have I slipped from their Cold War moorings and now drift in uncharted waters. The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) were set aside by President George W. Bush in December 2001. These accords were premised on equality, but the United States and the Russian Federation have become very unequal partners. It is always extremely difficult for arms control treaties to formalize fictional equality or to codify inequality in changing geopolitical circumstances. Durable treaties also require bipartisan political support in the United States, which was non-existent for the ABM Treaty prior to the Bush administration’s withdrawal decision.