OF THE NINE COUNTRIES known to have nuclear weapons, six are located in Asia and another, the United States, borders the Pacific Ocean. Russia and China were the first Asian nations with nuclear weapons, followed by Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Most of the world’s nuclear powers are reducing their arsenals or maintaining them at historic levels, but several of those in Asia—India, ...

Only a few nonnuclear weapons states with uranium-fueled power plants have kept the weapons option open, and none has evidenced activities intended for diverting fissionable material from its civilian system. Analysis of alternative strategies shows that acquisition of nuclear weapons material would probably depend on military production facilities rather than diversion. Horizontal proliferatio...

The enormous destructive power of present stocks of nuclear weapons poses the greatest threat to public health in human history. Technical changes in weapons design are leading to an increased emphasis on the ability to fight a nuclear war, eroding the concept of deterrence based on mutually assured destruction and increasing the risk of nuclear war. Medical planning and civil defence preparati...

As India seeks to develop and maintain its nuclear weapons arsenal, it faces the critical question of how to ensure the reliability and safety of its nuclear weapons, especially as they age, in the absence of full-fledged nuclear explosive tests. Further, India must decide how to increase the yield (or decrease the yield, as needed) and reduce the weights of its existing weapons designs—that is...

The paper addresses some major implications of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) engineering and nanotechnology for the improvement of existing types of nuclear weapons, and the development of more robust versions of these weapons, as well as for the development of fourth generations nuclear weapons in which nanotechnology will play an essential role.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August, 1945. The energy yields were equivalent to 12 500 tonnes and 20 000 tonnes of high explosive. Yields from thermonuclear weapons (H-bombs) range up to several megatons (Mt). Between 1945 and the signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, over 2000 nuclear tests were carried out by the USA, USSR, Britain, France and China, plus one by India. Mo...

Existing nuclear deterrence scholarship evinces a pervasive ‘‘existential bias,’’ assuming that once a state merely possesses nuclear weapons, it should be able to deter armed conflict. The empirical literature expresses this bias by simply dichotomously coding a state based on whether it has nuclear weapons, thereby treating all nuclear states as equivalent. Thus, whether nuclear weapons deter...