On Thermonuclear War

Author : Herman Kahn
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 135150178X
Total Pages : 690 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On Thermonuclear War written by Herman Kahn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Thermonuclear War was controversial when originally published and remains so today. It is iconoclastic, crosses disciplinary boundaries, and finally it is calm and compellingly reasonable. The book was widely read on both sides of the Iron Curtain and the result was serious revision in both Western and Soviet strategy and doctrine. As a result, both sides were better able to avoid disaster during the Cold War. The strategic concepts still apply: defense, local animosities, and the usual balance-of-power issues are still very much with us. Kahn's stated purpose in writing this book was simply: "avoiding disaster and buying time, without specifying the use of this time." By the late 1950s, with both sides H-bomb-armed, reason and time were in short supply. Kahn, a military analyst at Rand since 1948, understood that a defense based only on thermonuclear arnaments was inconceivable, morally questionable, and not credible.The book was the first to make sense of nuclear weapons. Originally created from a series of lectures, it provides insight into how policymakers consider such issues. One may agree with Kahn or disagree with him on specific issues, but he clearly defined the terrain of the argument. He also looks at other weapons of mass destruction such as biological and chemical, and the history of their use. The Cold War is over, but the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, and the lessons and principles developed in On Thermonuclear War apply as much to today's China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea as they did to the Soviets.

Author : Herman Kahn
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1412815592
Total Pages : 668 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On Thermonuclear War written by Herman Kahn and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2011-12-31 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Thermonuclear War was controversial when originally published and remains so today. It is iconoclastic, crosses disciplinary boundaries, and finally it is calm and compellingly reasonable. The book was widely read on both sides of the Iron Curtain and the result was serious revision in both Western and Soviet strategy and doctrine. As a result, both sides were better able to avoid disaster during the Cold War. The strategic concepts still apply: defense, local animosities, and the usual balance-of-power issues are still very much with us. Kahn's stated purpose in writing this book was simply: "avoiding disaster and buying time, without specifying the use of this time." By the late 1950s, with both sides H-bomb-armed, reason and time were in short supply. Kahn, a military analyst at Rand since 1948, understood that a defense based only on thermonuclear arnaments was inconceivable, morally questionable, and not credible. The book was the first to make sense of nuclear weapons. Originally created from a series of lectures, it provides insight into how policymakers consider such issues. One may agree with Kahn or disagree with him on specific issues, but he clearly defined the terrain of the argument. He also looks at other weapons of mass destruction such as biological and chemical, and the history of their use. The Cold War is over, but the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, and the lessons and principles developed in On Thermonuclear War apply as much to today's China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea as they did to the Soviets.

Author : Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674037561
Total Pages : 428 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Worlds of Herman Kahn written by Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herman Kahn was the only nuclear strategist in America who might have made a living as a standup comedian. In telling his story, Ghamari-Tabrizi captures an era that is still very much with us--a time whose innocence, gruesome nuclear humor, and outrageous but deadly serious visions of annihilation have their echoes in the "known unknowns and unknown unknowns" that guide policymakers in our own embattled world.

Author : Robert L. Holmes
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400860148
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On War and Morality written by Robert L. Holmes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The threat to the survival of humankind posed by nuclear weapons has been a frightening and essential focus of public debate for the last four decades and must continue to be so if we are to avoid destroying ourselves and the natural world around us. One unfortunate result of preoccupation with the nuclear threat, however, has been a new kind of "respectability" accorded to conventional war. In this radical and cogent argument for pacifism, Robert Holmes asserts that all war--not just nuclear war--has become morally impermissible in the modern world. Addressing a wide audience of informed and concerned readers, he raises dramatic questions about the concepts of "political realism" and nuclear deterrence, makes a number of persuasive suggestions for nonviolent alternatives to war, and presents a rich panorama of thinking about war from St. Augustine to Reinhold Niebuhr and Herman Kahn. Holmes's positions are compellingly presented and will provoke discussion both among convinced pacifists and among those whom he calls "militarists." "Militarists," we realize after reading this book, include the majority of us who live a friendly and peaceful personal life while supporting a system which, if Holmes is correct, guarantees war and risks eventual human extinction. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author : Herman Kahn
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351502204
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On Escalation written by Herman Kahn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this widely discussed and influential book, Herman Kahn probes the dynamics of escalation and demonstrates how the intensification of conflict can be depicted by means of a definite escalation ladder, ascent of which brings opponents closer to all-out war. At each rung of the ladder, before the climb proceeds, decisions must be made based on numerous choices. Some are clear and obvious, others obscure, but the options are always there. Thermonuclear annihilation, says Kahn, is unlikely to come through accident; but nations may elect to climb the ladder to extinction. The basic material for the book was developed in briefings delivered by Kahn to military and civilian experts and revised in the light of his findings of a trip to Vietnam in the 1960s. In On Escalation he states the facts squarely. He asks the reader to face unemotionally the terrors of a world fully capable of suicide and to consider carefully the alternatives to such a path. In the never-never land of nuclear warfare, where nuclear incredulity is pervasive and paralyzing to the imagination even for the professional analyst, salient details of possible scenarios for the outbreak of war, and even more for war fighting, are largely unexplored or even unnoticed. For scenarios in which war is terminated, the issues and possibilities of which are almost completely unstudied, the situation is even worse. Kahn's discussion throws light on the terrain and gives the individual a sense of the range of possibilities and complexities involved and are useful.

Author : Daniel Ellsberg
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1608196747
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Doomsday Machine written by Daniel Ellsberg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist for The California Book Award in Nonfiction The San Francisco Chronicle's Best of the Year List Foreign Affairs Best Books of the Year In These Times “Best Books of the Year" Huffington Post's Ten Excellent December Books List LitHub's “Five Books Making News This Week” From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the dangers of America's Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that continues to this day. Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand account of America's nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization--and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration--threatens our very survival. No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era. Framed as a memoir--a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participating--this gripping exposé reads like a thriller and offers feasible steps we can take to dismantle the existing "doomsday machine" and avoid nuclear catastrophe, returning Ellsberg to his role as whistle-blower. The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story and an ultimately hopeful--and powerfully important--book about not just our country, but the future of the world.

Author : George H. Quester
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
ISBN 13 : 9781412829847
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nuclear Monopoly written by George H. Quester and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the Cold War, theorists argue, nuclear arms stopped war, as both sides could retaliate with ""mutual assured destruction"". This fact begs the question: why did the USA not strike preemptively before the USSR developed atomic arms? This text sets the case for such a preventive nuclear war.

Author : Antulio J. Echevarria II
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107091977
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book War's Logic written by Antulio J. Echevarria II and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-18 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveys how American strategic theorists have understood the nature and character of war in the twentieth century.

Author : William Philpott
Publisher : Hachette UK
ISBN 13 : 0349142653
Total Pages : 760 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bloody Victory written by William Philpott and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2016-08-04 with total page 760 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1 July 1916: the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The hot, hellish day in the fields of northern France that has dominated our perception of the First World War for just shy of a century. The shameful waste; the pointlessness of young lives lost for the sake of a few yards; the barbaric attitudes of the British leaders; the horror and ignominy of failure. All have occupied our thoughts for generations. Yet are we right to view the Somme in this way? Drawing on a vast number of sources such as letters, diaries and numerous archives, Bloody Victory describes in vivid detail the physical conditions, the combat and exceptional bravery against the odds but it also, uniquely, captures how the Somme defined the twentieth century in so many ways. This is an utterly gripping new analysis of one of the most iconic campaigns in history.

Author : Jeffrey A Larsen
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804790914
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century written by Jeffrey A Larsen and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-02 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays by nuclear policy experts provide “a speculative but serious and well-informed journey through a variety of scenarios and contingencies” (Foreign Affairs). Recent decades have seen a slow but steady increase in nuclear armed states, and in the seemingly less constrained policy goals of some of the newer “rogue” states in the international system. The authors of On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century argue that a time may come when one of these states makes the conscious decision that using a nuclear weapon against the United States, its allies, or forward deployed forces in the context of a crisis or a regional conventional conflict may be in its interests. They assert that we are unprepared for these types of limited nuclear wars and that it is urgent we rethink the theory, policy, and implementation of force related to our approaches to this type of engagement. Together they critique Cold War doctrine on limited nuclear war and consider a number of the key concepts that should govern our approach to limited nuclear conflict in the future. These include identifying the factors likely to lead to limited nuclear war; examining the geopolitics of future conflict scenarios that might lead to small-scale nuclear use; and assessing strategies for crisis management and escalation control. Finally, they consider a range of strategies and operational concepts for countering, controlling, or containing limited nuclear war. “A series of trenchant essays that deconstruct a critical national security challenge that most of us wish did not exist. Assembling a star-studded cast of scholars, analysts, and policy practitioners, Larsen and Kartchner have produced some of the most important new thinking on an old topic.” —H-Diplo