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Nuclear-armed hypersonic weapons, with their ballistic missile defense (BMD) penetrating capability, will provide an overall strategically stabilizing effect in the global arena but will further destabilize regional competitions. Development and deployment of BMD is a strategically destabilizing agent since adversaries perceive that they can no longer hold each other at risk of a retaliatory nuclear strike. Nuclear hypersonic weapons, with their promised capability to defeat missile defenses, will bolster expectations of reciprocal nuclear strikes. When this capability to provide retaliation is undermined, strategic instability ensues and manifests as arms races, aggressive posturing, and bellicose rhetoric. Therefore, global nuclear powers, with their robust counterforce capabilities, should develop nuclear-armed hypersonic weapons to return deterrence to an era of assured vulnerability that keeps nuclear weapons holstered. However, introducing hypersonics, with first-strike counterforce and decapitation capabilities, to regional nuclear power competitions will have the opposite effect, further destabilizing an already uneasy peace. In both cases, some period of greater strategic instability will exist as nuclear-armed hypersonic weapons become operational in an unbalanced manner. That is, as one nuclear power attains BMD-defeating capability, opposing powers will perceive that they are at a disadvantage. To mitigate this transition period of instability, global powers should proceed in developing hypersonic weapons but counter regional instability by banning regional development and curtailing hypersonic technology proliferation.

The causes and prevention of nuclear war are critical to human survival but difficult to study empirically, as observations of nuclear war do not actually exist in the real world. The literature on nuclear war has remained largely theoretical as a consequence. To circumvent the observational constraint, this article investigates the impact of proliferation with laboratory-based nuclear-option games that experimentally manipulate the number of players (N) with a nuclear option. Results show that decisions are mostly peaceful in the dyadic N = 2 condition despite the existence of nuclear options with a relative first-strike advantage. However, a jump beyond N = 2 in the crisis interaction significantly sharpens the propensity to use the nuclear option. The findings highlight an avenue of research that evaluates mechanisms of nuclear war experimentally, moving research beyond the theoretical domain.

In this trenchant analysis, historian Bruce Kuklick examines the role of intellectuals in foreign policymaking. He recounts the history of the development of ideas about strategy and foreign policy during a critical period in American history: the era of the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. The book looks at how the country's foremost thinkers advanced their ideas during this time of United States expansionism, a period that culminated in the Vietnam War and détente with the Soviets. Beginning with George Kennan after World War II, and concluding with Henry Kissinger and the Vietnam War, Kuklick examines the role of both institutional policymakers such as those at The Rand Corporation and Harvard's Kennedy School, and individual thinkers including Paul Nitze, McGeorge Bundy, and Walt Rostow. Kuklick contends that the figures having the most influence on American strategy--Kissinger, for example--clearly understood the way politics and the exercise of power affects policymaking. Other brilliant thinkers, on the other hand, often played a minor role, providing, at best, a rationale for policies adopted for political reasons. At a time when the role of the neoconservatives' influence over American foreign policy is a subject of intense debate, this book offers important insight into the function of intellectuals in foreign policymaking.

Albert Wohlstetter, an influential innovator in strategic nuclear doctrine who advised Democratic and Republican administrations on military strategy, died on Jan 10, 1997 at the age of 83.

Did a \"doctrine race\" exist alongside the much-publicized arms competition between East and West? Using recent insights from organization theory, Kimberly Marten Zisk answers this question in the affirmative. Zisk challenges the standard portrayal of Soviet military officers as bureaucratic actors wedded to the status quo: she maintains that when they were confronted by a changing external security environment, they reacted by producing innovative doctrine. The author's extensive evidence is drawn from newly declassified Soviet military journals, and from her interviews with retired high-ranking Soviet General Staff officers and highly placed Soviet-Russian civilian defense experts. According to Zisk, the Cold War in Europe was powerfully influenced by the reactions of Soviet military officers and civilian defense experts to modifications in U.S. and NATO military doctrine. Zisk also asserts that, contrary to the expectations of many analysts, civilian intervention in military policy-making need not provoke pitched civil-military conflict. Under Gorbachev's leadership, for instance, great efforts were made to ensure that \"defensive defense\" policies reflected military officers' input and expertise. Engaging the Enemy makes an important contribution not only to the theory of military organizations and the history of Soviet military policy but also to current policy debates on East-West security issues. Kimberly Marten Zisk is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Faculty Associate of the Mershon Center at the Ohio State University.

In June 1994 the United States went to the brink of war with North Korea. With economic sanctions impending, President Bill Clinton approved the dispatch of substantial reinforcements to Korea, and plans were prepared for attacking the North's nuclear weapons complex. The turning point came in an extraordinary private diplomatic initiative by former President Jimmy Carter and others to reverse the dangerous American course and open the way to a diplomatic settlement of the nuclear crisis. Few Americans know the full details behind this story or perhaps realize the devastating impact it could have had on the nation's post-Cold War foreign policy. In this lively and authoritative book, Leon Sigal offers an inside look at how the Korean nuclear crisis originated, escalated, and was ultimately defused. He begins by exploring a web of intelligence failures by the United States and intransigence within South Korea and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Sigal pays particular attention to an American mindset that prefers coercion to cooperation in dealing with aggressive nations. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with policymakers from the countries involved, he discloses the details of the buildup to confrontation, American refusal to engage in diplomatic give-and-take, the Carter mission, and the diplomatic deal of October 1994. In the post-Cold War era, the United States is less willing and able than before to expend unlimited resources abroad; as a result it will need to act less unilaterally and more in concert with other nations. What will become of an American foreign policy that prefers coercion when conciliation is more likely to serve its national interests? Using the events that nearly led the United States into a second Korean War, Sigal explores the need for policy change when it comes to addressing the challenge of nuclear proliferation and avoiding conflict with nations like Russia, Iran, and Iraq. What the Cuban missile crisis was to fifty years of superpower conflict, the North Korean nuclear crisis is to the coming era.

Albert Wohlstetter, 83, a Rand Corp. researcher on such strategic matters as nuclear deterrence and a 1985 recipient of the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, died Jan. 9 in Los Angeles. He had a heart ailment. Dr. Wohlstetter was considered a major intellectual force behind efforts to avoid the spread of nuclear weapons and the drive to reduce reliance on them by developing nonnuclear weapon systems. In the late 1960s, he, along with former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and defense official Paul Nitze, led a public committee to support Nixon administration plans for an anti-ballistic missile system. Dr. Wohlstetter testified in favor of ABM before Congress and spoke out for the proposed system in academic and other public settings.

Albert Wohlstetter, an expert on nuclear deterrence during the Cold War who earned the nation's Medal of Freedom, died at the age of 83 on Jan 9, 1997.

Tal reviews The Cold World They Made: The Strategic Legacy of Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter by Ron Robin.