The central purpose of this article is to challenge conventional wisdom about nuclear proliferation. The author argues that the consensus view, focusing on national security considerations as the cause of proliferation, is dangerously inadequate because nuclear weapons programs also serve other, more parochial and less obvious objectives. Nuclear weapons, like other weapons, are more than tools of national security; they are political objects of considerable importance in domestic debates and internal bureaucratic struggles and can also serve as international normative symbols of modernity and identity. The body of this article examines three alternate theoretical frameworks - called {open_quotes}models{close_quotes} in the very informal sense of the term - about why states decide to build or refrain from developing nuclear weapons: {open_quotes}the security model,{close_quotes} according to which states build nuclear weapons to increase national security against foreign threats, especially nuclear threats; {open_quotes}the domestic politics model,{close_quotes} which envisions nuclear weapons as political tools used to advance parochial domestic and bureaucratic interests; and {open_quotes}the norms model,{close_quotes} under which nuclear weapons decisions are made because weapons acquisition, or restraint in weapons development, provides an important normative symbol of a state`s modernity and identity. Although many of the ideas underlying these models exist in the vastmore » case-study and proliferation-policy literatures, they have not been adequately analyzed, nor placed in a comparative theoretical framework, nor properly evaluated against empirical evidence. Models are compared to their theoretical conceptions of the causes of weapons development, present alternative interpretations of the history of some major proliferation decisions, and contrast the models` implications for nonproliferation policy. 71 refs.« less

Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?: Three Models in Search of a Bomb

International Security Studies (ISS) has changed and diversified in many ways since 1945. This book provides the first intellectual history of the development of the subject in that period. It explains how ISS evolved from an initial concern with the strategic consequences of superpower rivalry and nuclear weapons, to its current diversity in which environmental, economic, human and other securities sit alongside military security, and in which approaches ranging from traditional Realist analysis to Feminism and Post-colonialism are in play. It sets out the driving forces that shaped debates in ISS, shows what makes ISS a single conversation across its diversity, and gives an authoritative account of debates on all the main topics within ISS. This is an unparalleled survey of the literature and institutions of ISS that will be an invaluable guide for all students and scholars of ISS, whether traditionalist, ‘new agenda’ or critical. • The first book to tell the post-1945 story of International Security Studies and offer an integrated historical sociology of the whole field • Opens the door to a long-overdue conversation about what ISS is and where it should be going • Provides a detailed institutional account of ISS in terms of its journals, departments, think tanks and funding sources

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The Evolution of International Security Studies

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How much is enough? A risk management approach to computer security

Collecting airborne and spaceborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) information is mandatory for addressing the defense challenges posed in the 21st century. A key tool for increasing the information content of ISR is using advanced electrooptical devices, including hyperspectral imaging (HSI). This optical sensing technology offers high spectral resolution covering visible to long-wave infrared (LWIR) wavelengths. The increase in spectral information and spectral degrees of freedom create a unique opportunity to detect difficult targets at the subpixel level, analyze a scene without prior information of the materials to be encountered, distinguish hidden features and camouflage, identify chemical agents in plumes, tag disturbed earth over buried objects, and perform image classification with greatly improved accuracy. This article reviews the military- and security-driven applications of HSI. It analyzes and demonstrates sensing capabilities and advanced methodologies, summarizes the current spaceborne and airborne military HSI technologies, and reviews future technological developments.

Hypersectral Imaging for Military and Security Applications: Combining Myriad Processing and Sensing Techniques

Gavin, a principal promoter in the U.S. military of the development of tactical nuclear weapons, wrote, “Nuclear weapons will become conventional for several reasons, among them cost, effectiveness against enemy weapons, and ease of handling.”1 Indeed, during the 1950s numerous U.S. leaders fully expected that a nuclear weapon would become “just another weapon.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles accepted “the ultimate inevitability” that tactical nuclear weapons would gain “conventional” status.2 Adm. Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Dwight Eisenhower, predicted in 1956 that the use of nuclear weapons “would become accepted throughout the world just as soon as people could lay their hands upon them.”3 These leaders were articulating a view with a long tradition in the history of weapons and warfare: a weapon once introduced inevitably comes to be widely accepted as legitimate. In reality, however, nuclear weapons have come to be deaned as abhorrent and unacceptable weapons of mass destruction, with a taboo on their use. This taboo is associated with a widespread revulsion toward nuclear weapons and broadly held inhibitions on their use. The opprobrium has come to apply to all nuclear weapons, not just to large bombs or to certain types or uses of nuclear weapons. It has developed to the point that uses of nuclear weapons that were once considered plausible by at least some U.S. decisionmakers—for example, tactical battleaeld uses in limited wars and direct threats to deter enemies from conventional attack—have been severely delegitimized and are practically unthinkable policy options. Thomas Stigmatizing the Bomb

Stigmatizing the Bomb: Origins of the Nuclear Taboo

Several models have been proposed for the dose–response function and the incubation period distribution for human inhalation anthrax. These models give very different predictions for the severity of a hypothetical bioterror attack, when an attack might be detected from clinical cases, the efficacy of medical intervention and the requirements for decontamination. Using data from the 1979 accidental atmospheric release of anthrax in Sverdlovsk, Russia, and limited nonhuman primate data, this paper eliminates two of the contending models and derives parameters for the other two, thereby narrowing the range of models that accurately predict the effects of human inhalation anthrax. Dose–response functions that exhibit a threshold for infectivity are contraindicated by the Sverdlovsk data. Dose-dependent incubation period distributions explain the 10-day median incubation period observed at Sverdlovsk and the 1- to 5-day incubation period observed in nonhuman primate experiments.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/103/20/7589.full.pdf

Sverdlovsk revisited: Modeling human inhalation anthrax

This paper develops a probabilistic model that can be used to determine the technical performance required for a defense to meet specific political/military objectives. The defense objective is stated as a certain probability that no warheads leak through the defense. The technical performance is captured by the interceptor single‐shot probability of kill and the warhead detection, tracking, and classification probability. Attacks are characterized by the number of warheads and undiscriminated decoys. Barrage and shoot‐look‐shoot firing modes are examined, with the optimal interceptor allocation derived for the shoot‐look‐shoot mode. Applications of this model for sizing national and theater missile ballistic missile defenses are discussed.

/pdf/a-simple-model-for-calculating-ballistic-missile-defense-y98zbrr2e4.pdf

A simple model for calculating ballistic missile defense effectiveness

Simple Model for Calculating Ballistic Missile Defense Effectiveness, A

Ever since the pioneering work of Philip Sartwell, the incubation period distribution for infectious diseases is most often modeled using a lognormal distribution. Theoretical models based on underlying disease mechanisms in the host are less well developed. This article modifies a theoretical model originally developed by Brookmeyer and others for the inhalational anthrax incubation period distribution in humans by using a more accurate distribution to represent the in vivo bacterial growth phase and by extending the model to represent the time from exposure to death, thereby allowing the model to be fit to nonhuman primate time-to-death data. The resulting incubation period distribution and the dose dependence of the median incubation period are in good agreement with human data from the 1979 accidental atmospheric anthrax release in Sverdlovsk, Russia, and limited nonhuman primate data. The median incubation period for the Sverdlovsk victims is 9.05 (95% confidence interval = 8.0-10.3) days, shorter than previous estimates, and it is predicted to drop to less than 2.5 days at doses above 10(6) spores. The incubation period distribution is important because the left tail determines the time at which clinical diagnosis or syndromic surveillance systems might first detect an anthrax outbreak based on early symptomatic cases, the entire distribution determines the efficacy of medical intervention-which is determined by the speed of the prophylaxis campaign relative to the incubation period-and the right tail of the distribution influences the recommended duration for antibiotic treatment.

Modeling the Incubation Period of Inhalational Anthrax

We investigate the impact on effective terrorism response of the viability degradation of biological weapons agents in the environment. We briefly review the scientific understanding and modeling of agent environmental viability degradation. In general, agent susceptibility to viability loss is greatest for vegetative bacteria, intermediate for viruses, and least for bacterial spores. Survival is greatest in soil and progressively decreases in the following environments:  textiles, water, hard surfaces, and air. There is little detailed understanding of loss mechanisms. We analyze the time behavior and sensitivity of four mathematical models that are used to represent environmental viability degradation (the exponential, probability, and first- and second-order catastrophic decay models). The models behave similarly at short times (<30 min for our example case) but diverge to significantly different values at intermediate to long times. Hence, for a release event in which the majority of atmospheric expos...

Dean A. Wilkening

Papers

Sverdlovsk revisited: Modeling human inhalation anthrax

A simple model for calculating ballistic missile defense effectiveness

Simple Model for Calculating Ballistic Missile Defense Effectiveness, A

Modeling the Incubation Period of Inhalational Anthrax

Degradation of Biological Weapons Agents in the Environment: Implications for Terrorism Response