Security Without Nuclear Weapons

This book examines the question: Is the elimination of nuclear weapons feasible? Individual chapters address the major conceptual, technical, and economic issues in the design of a non-nuclear security regime. Other chapters explore more specialized issues as they relate to the feasibility of the elimination of nuclear weapons: elite perceptions and the decision-making process, verification, nuclear proliferation, fissile materials and warheads, alliance and regional hegemonies, and deterrence.

Revised and Updated 2018 Edition Eight years on from the first edition, worsening relations between the West and Russia, and the US and North Korea, have brought nuclear weapons back to the forefront of world attention and public concern. Almost thirty years after the Cold War ended, some 14,500 nuclear weapons remain; and the nuclear weapon states are all modernising their nuclear arsenals. They cite nuclear deterrence doctrine as the final, indispensable justification for maintaining them. This drives the spread of nuclear weapons to paranoid regimes and extremists who are least likely to be deterred. The fallacies of nuclear deterrence must, therefore, be exposed and alternatives offered if there is to be any serious prospect of eliminating nuclear weapons. A former operator of British nuclear weapons, Commander Green has drawn together a concise, carefully researched and documented account of the history, practicalities and dangerous contradictions at the heart of nuclear deterrence. He offers more credible, effective and responsible alternative strategies to deter aggression and achieve real security. Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham KCB, MA, a leading authority on deterrence, has written a major new Foreword to this edition, on the most sensitive and contentious issue in British defence policy with huge implications for the effectiveness, image and ethos of the Royal Navy. He concludes: 'This is a most important contribution to the debate on a subject which is crucial to the survival of the human race, and it needs to be read with a degree of humility and an open mind - qualities not always apparent among our decision-makers and their advisers.'

The first systematic look at the different strategies that states employ in their pursuit of nuclear weapons Much of the work on nuclear proliferation has focused on why states pursue nuclear weapons. The question of how states pursue nuclear weapons has received little attention. Seeking the Bomb is the first book to analyze this topic by examining which strategies of nuclear proliferation are available to aspirants, why aspirants select one strategy over another, and how this matters to international politics. Looking at a wide range of nations, from India and Japan to the Soviet Union and North Korea to Iraq and Iran, Vipin Narang develops an original typology of proliferation strategies—hedging, sprinting, sheltered pursuit, and hiding. Each strategy of proliferation provides different opportunities for the development of nuclear weapons, while at the same time presenting distinct vulnerabilities that can be exploited to prevent states from doing so. Narang delves into the crucial implications these strategies have for nuclear proliferation and international security. Hiders, for example, are especially disruptive since either they successfully attain nuclear weapons, irrevocably altering the global power structure, or they are discovered, potentially triggering serious crises or war, as external powers try to halt or reverse a previously clandestine nuclear weapons program. As the international community confronts the next generation of potential nuclear proliferators, Seeking the Bomb explores how global conflict and stability are shaped by the ruthlessly pragmatic ways states choose strategies of proliferation.

Alternative Security offers the thinking person a place to begin to kick the “nuclear habit.” Even as it accepts the premise that war is endemic to the human condition, it provides reassurance that an other-than-nuclear deterrence policy can work to effectively safeguard national and transnational interests. These eight original essays, acco

For more than forty years, the United States has maintained a public commitment to nuclear disarmament, and every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama has gradually reduced the size of America's nuclear forces. Yet even now, over two decades after the end of the Cold War, the United States maintains a huge nuclear arsenal on high alert and ready for war. The Americans, like the Russians, the Chinese, and other major nuclear powers, continue to retain a deep faith in the political and military value of nuclear force, and this belief remains enshrined at the center of U.S. defense policy regardless of the radical changes that have taken place in international politics. In No Use, national security scholar Thomas M. Nichols offers a lucid, accessible reexamination of the role of nuclear weapons and their prominence in U.S. security strategy. Nichols explains why strategies built for the Cold War have survived into the twenty-first century, and he illustrates how America's nearly unshakable belief in the utility of nuclear arms has hindered U.S. and international attempts to slow the nuclear programs of volatile regimes in North Korea and Iran. From a solid historical foundation, Nichols makes the compelling argument that to end the danger of worldwide nuclear holocaust, the United States must take the lead in abandoning unrealistic threats of nuclear force and then create a new and more stable approach to deterrence for the twenty-first century.

This book discusses the nuclear dilemma from various countries' points of view: from Japan, Korea, the Middle East, and others. The final chapter proposes a new solution for the nonproliferation treaty review.

Getting to Zero is an edited volume of chapters about the implications of total nuclear disarmament for international security and national security covering a range of perspectives.