Nuclear Reactions analyzes how nuclear weapons change the calculations states make in their foreign policies, why they do so, and why nuclear weapons have such different effects on the foreign ...policies of different countries.
Mark S. Bell argues that nuclear weapons are useful for more than deterrence. They are leveraged to pursue a wide range of goals in international politics, and the nations that acquire them significantly change their foreign policies as a result. Closely examining how these effects vary and what those variations have meant in the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa, Bell shows that countries are not generically "emboldened"—they change their foreign policies in different ways based on their priorities. This has huge policy implications: What would Iran do if it were to acquire nuclear weapons? Would Japanese policy toward the United States change if Japan were to obtain nuclear weapons? And what does the looming threat of nuclear weapons mean for the future of foreign policy? Far from being a relic of the Cold War, Bell argues, nuclear weapons are as important in international politics today as they ever were.
Thanks to generous funding from the University of Minnesota and its participation in TOME, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes, available from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories.
Grappling with the Bomb is a history of Britain’s 1950s program to test the hydrogen bomb, code name Operation Grapple. In 1957–58, nine atmospheric nuclear tests were held at Malden Island and ...Christmas Island—today, part of the Pacific nation of Kiribati. Nearly 14,000 troops travelled to the central Pacific for the UK nuclear testing program—many are still living with the health and environmental consequences. Based on archival research and interviews with nuclear survivors, Grappling with the Bomb presents i-Kiribati woman Sui Kiritome, British pacifist Harold Steele, businessman James Burns, Fijian sailor Paul Ah Poy, English volunteers Mary and Billie Burgess and many other witnesses to Britain’s nuclear folly.
At the dawn of the Atomic Age, Americans encountered troubling new questions brought about by the nuclear revolution: In a representative democracy, who is responsible for national public safety? How ...do citizens imagine themselves as members of the national collective when faced with the priority of individual survival? What do nuclear weapons mean for transparency and accountability in government? What role should scientific experts occupy within a democratic government? Nuclear weapons created a new arena for debating individual and collective rights. In turn, they threatened to destabilize the very basis of American citizenship. As Sarah E. Robey shows in Atomic Americans, people negotiated the contours of nuclear citizenship through overlapping public discussions about survival. Policymakers and citizens disagreed about the scale of civil defense programs and other public safety measures. As the public learned more about the dangers of nuclear fallout, critics articulated concerns about whether the federal government was operating in its citizens' best interests. By the early 1960s, a significant antinuclear movement had emerged, which ultimately contributed to the 1963 nuclear testing ban. Atomic Americans tells the story of a thoughtful body politic engaged in rewriting the rubric of rights and responsibilities that made up American citizenship in the Atomic Age.
Concerns about CBRN (chemical, biological, radioactive, nuclear) weapons have featured prominently in both political debates and media reporting about the ongoing threat from al Qaeda since 9/11. ...This book provides a chronological account of al Qaeda's efforts to acquire a CBRN weapon capability, and the evolution of the al Qaeda leadership's approach to actually using CBRN weapons, set against the context of the politicisation of the threat of CBRN terrorism in US security debates. Ben Cole explores how the inherently political nature of terrorist CBRN threats has helped to shape al Qaeda's approach to CBRN weapons, and shows how the heightened political sensitivities surrounding the threat have enabled some governments to manipulate it in order to generate domestic and international support for controversial policies, particularly the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Prominent research holds that the use of weapons of mass destruction is taboo. But how strong are these norms? Investigating this question among the mass public, we argue that some citizens actually ...support taboo policies in private but are unwilling to express counter-normative opinions openly due to fear of social sanction. These insincere norm-holders are difficult to identify empirically because they are observationally equivalent to sincere norm-holders in direct-question surveys. To overcome this challenge, we use a list design, which allows survey respondents to indirectly express sensitive opinions. The results from three list experiments show that between 10% and 17% of Americans falsify their preferences over chemical weapons use when asked directly. In an extension, we explore our framework in the realm of nuclear weapons and elite behavior. Our findings advance a specific debate on the strength of weapons taboos, while our conceptualization of insincere norm-holders and methodological application have broader implications for how scholars might think about and measure norms in international politics.
Abstract
Land-based delivery platform technology for artillery weapons is a comprehensive technology to study the adaptability of artillery weapon and land-based delivery platform, and its function ...is to is to provide transportation and loading platform for artillery and realize tactical mobility and battle mobility of artillery. This paper reviews the important technical progress of China’s artillery weapons in land-based delivery platform technology, contrasts and analyses the research progress at home and abroad, and outlooks the development trend and countermeasures in the field of land-based delivery platform technology for China’s artillery weapons.
As states continue to pursue nuclear weaponry, nuclear testing remains an important political issue in the twenty-first century. This survey examines how and why the U.S. conducted nuclear tests from ...1945 through 1963 and the resulting influence on key questions from normalization and de-normalization up to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
Intrasexually selected weapons Rico‐Guevara, Alejandro; Hurme, Kristiina J.
Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society,
February 2019, Volume:
94, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
ABSTRACT
We propose a practical concept that distinguishes the particular kind of weaponry that has evolved to be used in combat between individuals of the same species and sex, which we term ...intrasexually selected weapons (ISWs). We present a treatise of ISWs in nature, aiming to understand their distinction and evolution from other secondary sex traits, including from ‘sexually selected weapons’, and from sexually dimorphic and monomorphic weaponry. We focus on the subset of secondary sex traits that are the result of same‐sex combat, defined here as ISWs, provide not previously reported evolutionary patterns, and offer hypotheses to answer questions such as: why have only some species evolved weapons to fight for the opposite sex or breeding resources? We examined traits that seem to have evolved as ISWs in the entire animal phylogeny, restricting the classification of ISW to traits that are only present or enlarged in adults of one of the sexes, and are used as weapons during intrasexual fights. Because of the absence of behavioural data and, in many cases, lack of sexually discriminated series from juveniles to adults, we exclude the fossil record from this review. We merge morphological, ontogenetic, and behavioural information, and for the first time thoroughly review the tree of life to identify separate evolution of ISWs. We found that ISWs are only found in bilateral animals, appearing independently in nematodes, various groups of arthropods, and vertebrates. Our review sets a reference point to explore other taxa that we identify with potential ISWs for which behavioural or morphological studies are warranted. We establish that most ISWs come in pairs, are located in or near the head, are endo‐ or exoskeletal modifications, are overdeveloped structures compared with those found in females, are modified feeding structures and/or locomotor appendages, are most common in terrestrial taxa, are frequently used to guard females, territories, or both, and are also used in signalling displays to deter rivals and/or attract females. We also found that most taxa lack ISWs, that females of only a few species possess better‐developed weapons than males, that the cases of independent evolution of ISWs are not evenly distributed across the phylogeny, and that animals possessing the most developed ISWs have non‐hunting habits (e.g. herbivores) or are faunivores that prey on very small prey relative to their body size (e.g. insectivores). Bringing together perspectives from studies on a variety of taxa, we conceptualize that there are five ways in which a sexually dimorphic trait, apart from the primary sex traits, can be fixed: sexual selection, fecundity selection, parental role division, differential niche occupation between the sexes, and interference competition. We discuss these trends and the factors involved in the evolution of intrasexually selected weaponry in nature.
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty National Research Council; Policy and Global Affairs; Committee on Reviewing and Updating Technical Issues Related to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
03/2012
eBook
Open access
This report reviews and updates the 2002 National Research Council report, Technical Issues Related to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) . This report also assesses various topics, ...including:
the plans to maintain the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile without nuclear-explosion testing;
the U.S. capability to detect, locate, and identify nuclear explosions;
commitments necessary to sustain the stockpile and the U.S. and international monitoring systems; and
potential technical advances countries could achieve through evasive testing and unconstrained testing.
Sustaining these technical capabilities will require action by the National Nuclear Security Administration, with the support of others, on a strong scientific and engineering base maintained through a continuing dynamic of experiments linked with analysis, a vigorous surveillance program, adequate ratio of performance margins to uncertainties. This report also emphasizes the use of modernized production facilities and a competent and capable workforce with a broad base of nuclear security expertise.
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