Nuclear Strategy and Weapons
Jul 31, 2006 | Briefing Book
Washington, DC - July 31, 2006 - During the past year, indications that the Bush White House was seriously considering a "nuclear option" against Iranian nuclear sites understandably alarmed many in the press and public as well as the U.S. high command. Some treated such alleged planning as saber-rattling bluff, while others saw it as an example of a related madman strategy. These scenarios are not without historical precedent.
Nov 23, 2005 | Briefing Book
Washington, D.C., November 23, 2005 - The nuclear war plans that constitute the Single Integrated Operational Plan have been among the most closely guarded secrets in the U.S. government. The handful of substantive documents on the first SIOP -- SIOP-62 (for fiscal year 1962) -- that have been the source of knowledge about it have been declassified, reclassified, re-released, and then closed again, fortunately not before key items had been copied at the archives.
Aug 5, 2005 | Briefing Book
Washington, D.C., August 5, 2005 - Sixty years ago this month, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and the Japanese government surrendered to the United States and its allies. The nuclear age had truly begun with the first military use of atomic weapons. With the material that follows, the National Security Archive publishes the most comprehensive on-line collection to date of declassified U.S. government documents on the atomic bomb and the end of the war in the Pacific.
Jul 1, 2005 | Briefing Book
Washington D.C. July 1, 2005 - A decision to use nuclear weapons is one of the most politically, militarily, and morally perilous decisions that a U.S. president, or any leader of a nuclear state, can make. Recognizing that nuclear weapons differ from any other weapons because of their immense power and danger, President Lyndon B. Johnson once argued that a decision to use them "would lead us down an uncertain path of blows and counterblows whose outcome none may know." (Note 1) Johnson, like most U.S.
May 13, 2005 | Briefing Book
Washington D.C. May 13, 2005 - The Soviet-led Warsaw Pact had a long-standing strategy to attack Western Europe that included being the first to use nuclear weapons, according to a new book of previously Secret Warsaw Pact documents published tomorrow. Although the aim was apparently to preempt NATO "aggression," the Soviets clearly expected that nuclear war was likely and planned specifically to fight and win such a conflict.
Jul 13, 2004 | News
The U.S. included so many nuclear weapons in its first missile-age plan for nuclear war that top military commanders called it a "hazard to ourselves as well as our enemy," according to newly declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Under the first Single Integrated Operational Plan, prepared during 1960, a Russian city the size of Nagasaki--devastated in 1945 with a twenty kiloton bomb--would receive three 80 kiloton weapons. President Dwight D.
Jul 13, 2004 | Briefing Book
Since it was first created in 1960, the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)--the U.S. plan for nuclear war--has been one of the most secret and sensitive issues in U.S. national security policy. The essence of the first SIOP was a massive nuclear strike on military and urban-industrial targets in the Soviet Union, China, and their allies. To make such an attack possible, U.S.
Jan 14, 2004 | News
Washington, D.C. - A nuclear weapon at the "small" end of historic strategic arsenals that exploded over the Pentagon would create a mass fire that would engulf the Washington, D.C. area as far as Capitol Hill, Dupont Circle, and Alexandria. According to a study published this month, the detonation would not only unleash the well-known blast effects and hurricane force winds that would crush the Pentagon and knock over nearby buildings, but the bomb would also generate a "hurricane of fire" that would destroy almost everything within 40 to 65 square miles.
Jan 14, 2004 | Briefing Book
Scenarios of nuclear attacks on the United States, whether by terrorist or state adversaries, have assumed that Washington, D.C. would be a major target. A startling article published as the cover story of theJanuary-February 2004 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describes the enormously destructive effects to the Washington, D.C. area if, on a clear day, an adversary exploded, 1500 feet above the Pentagon, a nuclear weapon with an explosive force of 300 kilotons (20 times the explosive force of the Hiroshima weapon).
Dec 23, 2002 | Briefing Book
Today, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published an article, "Nixon's Nuclear Ploy,'' by National Security Archive senior analyst William Burr and Miami University historian Jeffrey Kimball,(1) that discloses for the first time one of the Nixon administration's most secret military operations. During October 1969, President Richard Nixon ordered the Pentagon to undertake secretly a series of military measures designed to put U.S. nuclear forces on a higher state of readiness. For nearly three weeks, U.S. nuclear bombers were on higher alert, while U.S.