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The threat of nuclear terrorism in the United States has led its leadership to contemplate an extreme military response--namely, nuclear preemption. To some preemption proponents, nuclear weapons are no longer considered the option of last resort. This article argues that reducing the nuclear threshold for some international actors and not others is perhaps just as dangerous as the proliferation the nuclear preemption doctrine is trying counter. The nuclear "taboo" has once again ceased to exist.[Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2006 The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

The threat of nuclear terrorism in the United States has led its leadership to contemplate an extreme military response -- namely, nuclear preemption. To some preemption proponents, nuclear weapons are no longer considered the option of last resort. This article argues that reducing the nuclear threshold for some international actors & not others is perhaps just as dangerous as the proliferation the nuclear preemption doctrine is trying counter. The nuclear "taboo" has once again ceased to exist. References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2006 The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

Newhouse, John: War and peace in the nuclear age. - New York/N.Y. : Knopf, 1989, 486 S. + Rezension von: Bundy, McGeorge: Danger and survival: choices about the bomb in the first fifty years. - New York/N.Y. : Random House, 1988, 735 S

The debate over nuclear proliferation has generated a large literature, but this literature does not adequately address the moral issues. A moral analysis of proliferation must go beyond concerns of international security. In this essay, Lee addresses the following questions: (1) Does nuclear proliferation make the world a more dangerous place; that is, does it increase security? (2) Is it morally permissible for a nonnuclear state to acquire nuclear weapons? (3) What are morally permissible actions for states trying to keep other states from acquiring nuclear weapons?

In numerous crises after World War II--Berlin, Korea, the Taiwan Straits, and the Middle East--the United States resorted to vague threats to use nuclear weapons in order to deter Soviet or Chinese military action. On a few occasions the Soviet Union also engaged in nuclear saber-ratling. Using declassified documents and other sources, this volume examines those crises and compares the decisionmaking processes of leaders who considered nuclear threats with the commonly accepted logic of nuclear deterrence and coercion. Rejecting standard explanations of our leader's logic in these cases, Betts suggests that U.S. presidents were neither consciously blufffing when they made nuclear threats, nor prepared to face the consequences if their threats failed. The author also challenges the myth that the 1950s was a golden age of low vulberability for the United Stateas and details how nuclear parity has, and has not, altered conditions that gave rise to nuclear blackmail in the past.

This essay explores the effect of the "nuclear winter" thesis upon the strategic debate. Both "hawks" and "doves" responded to the nuclear winter thesis in an ideological manner, illustrating the theological nature of the debate on nuclear strategy. Hawks used the nuclear winter data to argue for limited nuclear options, strategic modernization, environmentally sensitive weapons, and strategic defense. Doves used the same information to argue for mutual assured destruction, arms control, and/or global disarmament. Another group of analysts, the "pragmatic Center," exhibited a more flexible, subtle understanding of the nuclear dilemma.