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For decades, films such as WarGames and The Terminator have warned that the combination of artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons might be a recipe for an apocalypse. Might these prophecies of doom become reality in coming decades? Using insights from computer science, Deterrence under Uncertainty: Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Warfare evaluates how AI could make nuclear war winnable, and whether that possibility is likely. Detailed chapters explain how the landscape of nuclear deterrence is changing and debunks the myths of machine intelligence and nuclear weapons. This book gives a practitioner's perspective on how artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies could change the role of nuclear weapons in international relations.

"The dangerous, decades-long arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War begged a fundamental question: how did these superpowers actually plan to survive a nuclear strike? In Armageddon insurance, the first historical account of Soviet civil defense and a pioneering reappraisal of its American counterpart, Edward M. Geist compares how the two superpowers tried, and mostly failed, to reinforce their societies to withstand the ultimate catastrophe"--

"The dangerous, decades-long arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War begged a fundamental question: how did these superpowers actually plan to survive a nuclear strike? In Armageddon insurance, the first historical account of Soviet civil defense and a pioneering reappraisal of its American counterpart, Edward M. Geist compares how the two superpowers tried, and mostly failed, to reinforce their societies to withstand the ultimate catastrophe"--

Abstract
During the rule of Josef Stalin, the Soviet government sought to promulgate a common culinary aesthetic to facilitate the goals of the Soviet project. But pushback against these "socialist realist foodways" emerged in Soviet Ukraine. During the Khrushchev era the Ukrainian government took the step of creating Ukrains"ki stravy ("Ukrainian Dishes"). First published in 1957, this Ukrainian-language cookbook sought to articulate foodways that were both socialist realist and distinctively Ukrainian. The inevitable contradictions within this effort foreshadowed the problems that would dominate Soviet food discourse in subsequent decades, as the USSR's citizens increasingly critiqued the shortcomings of the Soviet food system and attempted to reclaim prerevolutionary, and particularly national, culinary traditions. Drawing on published and archival Ukrainian sources, this paper explores the uncomfortable balance between nationality policy and official Soviet food discourse in the postwar era, and how this contributed to the eventual demise of socialist realist foodways.

Ever since the accident that destroyed unit 4 of the Chernobyl' Nuclear Power Plant on April 26,1986, became public knowledge, the Soviet government's response to this catastrophe has been the subject of bewilderment and withering criticism. The exact sequence of events that unfolded in the days following the disaster and the forces that shaped it have, however, remained obscure. While the USSR's civil defense organization urged prompt and decisive measures to inform the population of the accident and move people out of harm's way, other Soviet institutions, such as the Communist Party and the KGB, feared the accident's threat to their legitimacy more than its implications for public health. Drawing on declassified archival documents from Ukrainian archives and memoir literature, I explore the political and institutional logic that prevented the USSR from acting appropriately to protect citizens from the consequences of the nuclear accident.

During the Cold War, the nature, intent, and scale of Soviet civil defense were the subject of heated debate in the West. Some analysts claimed that the USSR possessed a massive civil defense program capable of seriously destabilizing the strategic nuclear balance. This article draws on previously unexamined archival sources to investigate Soviet shelter construction from 1953, when the USSR's civil defense forces began planning for nuclear war, until the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. These documents indicate that shelter construction consumed the majority of Soviet civil defense funding and was conducted by order of the Council of Ministers. Although the shelters were inadequate both technologically and quantitatively to protect the Soviet population from an all-out U.S. thermonuclear attack, they existed in significant numbers and represented a considerable expenditure of limited Soviet resources. These new revelations provide important insights into Soviet thinking about nuclear war during the Khrushchev era.

During the Cold War, the nature, intent, and scale of Soviet civil defense were the subject of heated debate in the West. Some analysts claimed that the USSR possessed a massive civil defense program capable of seriously destabilizing the strategic nuclear balance. This article draws on previously unexamined archival sources to investigate Soviet shelter construction from 1953, when the USSR's civil defense forces began planning for nuclear war, until the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. These documents indicate that shelter construction consumed the majority of Soviet civil defense funding and was conducted by order of the Council of Ministers. Although the shelters were inadequate both technologically and quantitatively to protect the Soviet population from an all-out U.S. thermonuclear attack, they existed in significant numbers and represented a considerable expenditure of limited Soviet resources. These new revelations provide important insights into Soviet thinking about nuclear war during the Khrushchev era. Adapted from the source document.