Atomic Steppe tells the untold true story of how the obscure country of Kazakhstan said no to the most powerful weapons in human history. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the marginalized Central ...Asian republic suddenly found itself with the world's fourth largest nuclear arsenal on its territory. Would it give up these fire-ready weapons-or try to become a Central Asian North Korea?This book takes us inside Kazakhstan's extraordinary and little-known nuclear history from the Soviet period to the present. For Soviet officials, Kazakhstan's steppe was not an ecological marvel or beloved homeland, but an empty patch of dirt ideal for nuclear testing. Two-headed lambs were just the beginning of the resulting public health disaster for Kazakhstan-compounded, when the Soviet Union collapsed, by the daunting burden of becoming an overnight nuclear power.Equipped with intimate personal perspective and untapped archival resources, Togzhan Kassenova introduces us to the engineers turned diplomats, villagers turned activists, and scientists turned pacifists who worked toward disarmament. With thousands of nuclear weapons still present around the world, the story of how Kazakhs gave up their nuclear inheritance holds urgent lessons for global security.
After World War II, an atomic hierarchy emerged in the noncommunist world. Washington was at the top, followed over time by its NATO allies and then Israel, with the postcolonial world completely ...shut out. An Indian diplomat called the system "nuclear apartheid."Drawing on recently declassified sources from U.S. and international archives, Shane Maddock offers the first full-length study of nuclear apartheid, casting a spotlight on an ideological outlook that nurtured atomic inequality and established the United States--in its own mind--as the most legitimate nuclear power. Beginning with the discovery of fission in 1939 and ending with George W. Bush's nuclear policy and his preoccupation with the "axis of evil," Maddock uncovers the deeply ideological underpinnings of U.S. nuclear policy--an ideology based on American exceptionalism, irrational faith in the power of technology, and racial and gender stereotypes. The unintended result of the nuclear exclusion of nations such as North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran is, increasingly, rebellion.Here is an illuminating look at how an American nuclear policy based on misguided ideological beliefs has unintentionally paved the way for an international "wild west" of nuclear development, dramatically undercutting the goal of nuclear containment and diminishing U.S. influence in the world.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left its nearly 30,000 nuclear weapons spread over the territories of four newly sovereign states: Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine. ...This collapse cast a shadow of profound ambiguity over the fate of the world's largest arsenal of the deadliest weapons ever created. In Inheriting the Bomb , Mariana Budjeryn reexamines the history of nuclear predicament caused by the Soviet collapse and the subsequent nuclear disarmament of the non-Russian Soviet successor states.
Although Belarus and Kazakhstan renounced their claim to Soviet nuclear weapons, Ukraine proved to be a difficult case: with its demand for recognition as a lawful successor state of the USSR, a nuclear superpower, the country became a major proliferation concern. And yet by 1994, Ukraine had acceded to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear-weapon state and proceeded to transfer its nuclear warheads to Russia, which emerged as the sole nuclear successor of the USSR.
How was this international proliferation crisis averted? Drawing on extensive archival research in the former Soviet Union and the United States, Budjeryn uncovers a fuller and more nuanced narrative of post-Soviet denuclearization. She reconstructs Ukraine's path to nuclear disarmament to understand how its leaders made sense of the nuclear armaments their country inherited. Among the various factors that contributed to Ukraine's nuclear renunciation, including diplomatic pressure from the United States and Russia and domestic economic woes, the NPT stands out as a salient force that provided an international framework for managing the Soviet nuclear collapse.
Downwindis an unflinching tale of the atomic West that reveals the intentional disregard for human and animal life through nuclear testing by the federal government and uranium extraction by mining ...corporations during and after the Cold War.
Sarah Alisabeth Fox highlights the personal cost of nuclear testing and uranium extraction in the American West through extensive interviews with "downwinders," the Native American and non-Native residents of the Great Basin region affected by nuclear environmental contamination and nuclear-testing fallout. These downwinders tell tales of communities ravaged by cancer epidemics, farmers and ranchers economically ruined by massive crop and animal deaths, and Native miners working in dangerous conditions without proper safety equipment so that the government could surreptitiously study the effects of radiation on humans.
In chilling detailDownwindbrings to light the stories and concerns of these groups whose voices have been silenced and marginalized for decades in the name of "patriotism" and "national security."
With the renewed boom in mining in the American West, Fox's look at this hidden history, unearthed from years of field interviews, archival research, and epidemiological studies, is a must-read for every American concerned about the fate of our western lands and communities.
Many authoritarian leaders want nuclear weapons, but few manage to acquire them. Autocrats seeking nuclear weapons fail in different ways and to varying degrees-Iraq almost managed it; Libya did not ...come close. InUnclear Physics, Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer compares the two failed nuclear weapons programs, showing that state capacity played a crucial role in the trajectory and outcomes of both projects. Braut-Hegghammer draws on a rich set of new primary sources, collected during years of research in archives, fieldwork across the Middle East, and interviews with scientists and decision makers from both states. She gained access to documents and individuals that no other researcher has been able to consult. Her book tells the story of the Iraqi and Libyan programs from their origins in the late 1950s and 1960s until their dismantling.
This book reveals contemporary perspectives from scientists and regime officials on the opportunities and challenges facing each project. Many of the findings challenge the conventional wisdom about clandestine weapons programs in closed authoritarian states and their prospects of success or failure. Braut-Hegghammer suggests that scholars and analysts ought to pay closer attention to how state capacity affects nuclear weapons programs in other authoritarian regimes, both in terms of questioning the actual control these leaders have over their nuclear weapons programs and the capability of their scientists to solve complex technical challenges.
The United States, Russia, China, and India are the only states that have tested anti-satellite weapons (ASATs) by deliberately destroying orbiting satellites. In this paper, a mix of practical and ...aspirational factors are investigated in the context of heightened propensity for a state's testing of ASATs. The strategic competition and rivalry between these global and regional space powers generates an environment of conflict and insecurity. In the absence of an international treaty to constrain behavior, these states are driven to amass counterspace capabilities to secure their assets and establish space dominance.
Apache Over Libya Staffa, Bill
Air Power History,
03/2022, Volume:
69, Issue:
1
Journal Article, Book Review
Peer reviewed
The book is a narrative history of the period between Laidlaw's assumption of command and September of 2011, when the unit stood down and was withdrawn from the line after a unique mission ...highlighted by a series of pinpoint attack sorties into Libya. From June through early August, 556 Squadron conducted 48 attack sorties against 116 targets, about 56% of all the sorties launched by UK forces in support of the NATO operation against Gaddafi during that period. Targets attacked as part of an overall plan to confuse the enemy ranged from T-72 tanks and ZSU-23 anti-aircraft weapons to the ever-present mobile weapons of the pro-Gaddafi forces.
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.
Does it make sense for the United States to cooperate with Russia to resolve international security issues? Is it possible for the two countries to work together to reduce the dangers associated with ...nuclear weapons? Where does Vladimir Putin fit into the calculus? Engaging the debate on these contentious issues, Stephen Cimbala provides context for and policy-relevant analysis of current US-Russian nuclear relations.
