Nuclear Weapons Policy, Planning and War Objectives: Toward a Theater-Oriented Deterrent Strategy,

Abstract

The U.S. strategic nuclear policy debate has for years been marked by confusion and chaos. Despite the investment of considerable analytic effort, planners remain deeply divided on basic issues relating to budgets, force structure choices, employment strategies, arms control concepts, and the like. This basic dilemma is as follows. On the one hand, nuclear weapons cannot serve national objectives in the same ways that other military forces can. On the other hand, like it or not, both the United States and Soviet Union maintain large nuclear forces, and, for reasons I will list it is imperative to plan for their use.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 1982
Accession Number
ADA138260

Entities

People

  • K. N. Lewis

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Counter WMD
  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Defense
  • Arms Control
  • California
  • Civil Defense
  • Defense Planning
  • Deterrence
  • Doctrine
  • Force Structure
  • Homeland Defense
  • International Security
  • Military Planning
  • National Politics
  • Nuclear Weapons
  • Political Science
  • United States
  • Ussr
  • Weapons

Fields of Study

  • Political science

Readers

  • Strategic Security Studies