Imagining Nuclear War In The British Army 1945 1989

The primary mission assigned to the British Army from the 1950s until the end of the Cold War was deterring Soviet aggression in Europe by demonstrating the will and capability to fight with nuclear weapons in defence of NATO territory. This 'surreal' mission was unlike any other in history, and raised a number of conceptual and practical difficulties. This comprehensive study observes how the British Army imagined nuclear war, and how it planned to fight it. Using new archival sources, Simon J. Moody analyses British thinking about tactical nuclear weapons, the role of the Army within NATO strategy, the development of theories of tactical nuclear warfare, how nuclear war was taught at the Staff College, the role of operational research, and the evolution of the Army's nuclear war-fighting doctrine. He argues that the British Army possessed the intellectual capacity for organisational adaptation, but that it displayed a cognitive dissonance about some of the more uncomfortable realities of nuclear war.

The primary mission assigned to the British Army from the 1950s until the end of the Cold War was deterring Soviet aggression in Europe by demonstrating the will and capability to fight with nuclear weapons in defence of NATO territory. This "surreal" mission was unlike any other in history,and raised a number of conceptual and practical difficulties. This comprehensive study observes how the British Army imagined nuclear war, and how it planned to fight it. Using new archival sources, Simon J. Moody analyses British thinking about tactical nuclear weapons, the role of the Army withinNATO strategy, the development of theories of tactical nuclear warfare, how nuclear war was taught at the Staff College, the role of operational research, and the evolution of the Army's nuclear war-fighting doctrine. He argues that the British Army possessed the intellectual capacity fororganisational adaptation, but that it displayed a cognitive dissonance about some of the more uncomfortable realities of nuclear war.

The story of the British army, from its inception in the late seventeenth century to the present. This new concise history by one of Britain's leading military historians explores the British army from the creation of a permanent standing army in the seventeenth century to the present. It sets the institutional development of the British army, and its often ambiguous relationship with state and society, as well as the army's wider political, social, economic, and cultural role within international, imperial, national, regional, and local contexts. An army exists to fight, however, and the British army's story cannot be separated from those wars and conflicts that have punctuated its evolution. Consequently, attention is also paid to the army's commanders, operations, and battlefields from the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the seventeenth century to Iraq and Afghanistan in the twenty-first. Beckett traces the army's evolution through five chronological phases: the standing army of the seventeenth century and its antecedents, the national army of the eighteenth century, the imperial army of the nineteenth century, the people's army of the two world wars, the era of national service, and the return to a small professional army fulfilling a global role envisaged by successive governments in the twenty-first century at a time of rapidly changing social attitudes towards the utility of force, that pose a challenge to the army's traditional core values.

Nearly 40 years after the concept of finite deterrence was popularized by the Johnson administration, nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) thinking appears to be in decline. The United States has rejected the notion that threatening population centers with nuclear attacks is a legitimate way to assure deterrence. Most recently, it withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an agreement based on MAD. American opposition to MAD also is reflected in the Bush administration's desire to develop smaller, more accurate nuclear weapons that would reduce the number of innocent civilians killed in a nuclear strike. Still, MAD is influential in a number of ways. First, other countries, like China, have not abandoned the idea that holding their adversaries' cities at risk is necessary to assure their own strategic security. Nor have U.S. and allied security officials and experts fully abandoned the idea. At a minimum, acquiring nuclear weapons is still viewed as being sensible to face off a hostile neighbor that might strike one's own cities. Thus, our diplomats have been warning China that Japan would be under tremendous pressure to go nuclear if North Korea persisted in acquiring a few crude weapons of its own. Similarly, Israeli officials have long argued, without criticism, that they would not be second in acquiring nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Indeed, given that Israelis surrounded by enemies that would not hesitate to destroy its population if they could, Washington finds Israel's retention of a significant nuclear capability totally "understandable."

is understudied, both inside and outside of government. Tactical weapons, although less awesome than their strategic siblings, carry significant security and political risks, and they have not received the attention that is commensurate to their importance. Second, it is clear that whatever the future of these arms, the status quo is unacceptable. It is past the time for NATO to make more resolute decisions, find a coherent strategy, and formulate more definite plans about its nuclear status. Consequently, decisions about the role of nuclear weapons within the Alliance and the associated supporting analysis are fundamental to the future identity of NATO. At the Lisbon Summit in Portugal in November 2010, the Alliance agreed to conduct the Deterrence and Defense Posture Review (DDPR). This effort is designed to answer these difficult questions prior to the upcoming NATO Summit in May 2012.

Nuclear War: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and A Workable Moral Strategy for Achieving and Preserving World Peace Raymond G. Wilson "The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the United States since the days of Andrew Jackson." Franklin D. Roosevelt There is considerable reason to believe President Roosevelt's statement is quite true, thus the "financial element in the large centers" shares responsibility and blame for the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of war deaths in the last two decades. The people of the world need protection from those responsible for provoking nations to war. In the United States this responsibility lies with all elements in the highest levels of government, the decision makers. It lies with those who tinker with political and economic machinations, most likely for the advantage of "a financial element in the large centers." These are probably people young enough and sufficiently uninformed to have no conception of the atrocity of the nuclear confrontations and conflagrations to which they are quite possibly leading the world. This group of people may include most people serving in the U.S. Congress and from personal experience many in the U.S. Military. I have my doubts whether Presidents have seen all of the results of the world's first nuclear war; they are probably shielded from this. Photographs of the victims were confiscated and held confidential for more than 22 years after 1945. There were well more than 210,000 victims; not many photographs were made and survived. You can learn from this book a tiny fraction of the truth about what happens to people caught in nuclear war. (Although the truth from more than 210,000 will never be heard.) In a future war there would be hundreds of thousands, more likely hundreds of millions, of victims. The United States government has not revealed this kind of truth about its first nuclear war. As of early 2014 no sitting president has ever visited Hiroshima or Nagasaki. In Chapter 5 a solution is suggested to save us all from our "nuclear madness". "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." --Dwight D. Eisenhower, "...we also possess the seeds of goodness and justice that humankind was given by nature and has fostered over the ages. We have the ability to cultivate self-control and consideration for others and to strive to live together in a humane and harmonious manner with others. The revival of such true humanity--not only between individuals, but also between nations--is an absolute necessity today, for the age has come when one nation's self-centered behavior could lead all humanity to annihilation." --Naomi Shohno, 1986 "America can do whatever we set our mind to." ―Barack Obama