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Excessive attention over the years to issues contained within the confines of the concept of the strategic balance have had notable consequences—generally by limiting attention to but one perspective on an extraordinarily complex and dynamic problem and specifically by ignoring critical command and control aspects of the whole. This article elaborates the theme of neglect and its consequences and then identifies and assembles many of the missing, but essential, pieces of the "C3I Puzzle."

Prior to World War II, American national security policy was formed by a loosely connected elite that generally operated from a business-financial base in the northeastern United States. It was from this group that secretaries of state and war were drawn and among this group that serious long-range thinking on important security issues was undertaken. The power of this community continued after the war, probably reaching its zenith in the 1950s, when an important change occurred. Unversities like Harvard, Yale, and Chicago gained prominence at this time, but the more interesting phenomenon was the emergence of so-called "defense intellectuals" at places like the Rand Corporation and other think tanks.

Terrorism in the global setting has become the predominant form of confrontation between differing subcategories of societies that seek to overcome each other, regardless of size. In the case of nuclear terrorism, the consequences of failure are potentially catastrophic. While the logic of our strategic nuclear policy is clear, the same clarity does not hold for policies directed at nuclear terrorism. In the former case, a prevailing view is that the risk of nuclear war is low because the United States responds vigilantly to nuclear threats posed by other nations. In the latter case, there is no terrorist prevention doctrine, nor is there an institutional focus for preventing terrorism that is even remotely commensurate with that which exists for deterring nuclear war. We here consider the dimensions of the nuclear terrorism problem, discuss these with respect to the Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile system, consider the capabilities and objectives of potential terrorist groups, and formulate some basic recommendations for improving the current state of affairs.

While the causes & conduct of wars have attracted a great deal of attention, their termination has largely been ignored. War initiation often takes place without clear definition of war objectives, as a product of bureaucratic decision-making patterns. This allows military officers to conduct the war according to purely military criteria, seeking total defeat of the enemy. Peace planning in fact should begin at the start of a war or before. A key problem lies in the inapplicability of conventional warfare concepts to nuclear warfare, which takes place on a radically different time scale. Nuclear war might easily disrupt communications to the point where those leaders with authority to end war had no control over their own forces. Peace planning will require considerable research, especially into the motives & objectives of potential opponents. Modified HA.