Issues During the Nuclear Age

The book was published in 1988, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, which gives the book a accredited antiquated feel approximative the end as the author speculates on the course of the upcoming and places great emphasis on the need for Gorbachev to remain and to keep up his reforms:

The bilateral relationship being worked out should be to a greater extent important than arms control itself, assuming, of course, that Gorbachev survives (420).

Newhouse therefore details the recital of the Cold struggle but just misses its end. He certainly does not foresee the sorts of changes that were coming within a year. Newhouse wrote at a while when the nuclear threat was being talked virtually as if it were greater than ever before, and this may have been a consequence of the Reagan era, when the Soviet Union was described as the atrocious Empire and when nuclear proliferation was as well as taking place so that more countries had the capability to make a nuclear device. This was also the era when terrorism was rising around the world, with the added threat that a terrorism group top executive be adapted to put on a nuclear device and use it for its own purposes. Americans were curiously fearful of potential nuclear power additions such as Libya and Iran.

For all the concern nuclear capability has raised as to the potential for world disaster, it is also true, as Newhouse

Since the end of World fight II, well o'er a half million Americans have been killed or maimed in battle. During this time, no American President ever seriously considered using nuclear weapons to shorten a war or settle a political crisis in which the interests of the fall in States seemed to be directly threatened (12).

Chernobyl shook every European capital. Its radioactive fallout affected all their countries, as did the questions it raised more or less nuclear power (390).

The reaction to Sputnik and certain other incidents shows that during this period, the perceptual experience of the threat of a nuclear strike was raised to a high level in part as a means of driving American policy in certain directions.

This was the beginning of the era when leaders were to be divided into hawks and doves, into those who desire more nuclear capability and those who sought disarmament and a reduction in confrontation. It was also the beginning of a time when more and more diplomatic and international tensions would be fuel by the response to the nuclear threat. Eisenhower responded to fear of the Soviets with increased note by spy planes, such as the U-2 flight that crashed inside(a) Russia and so created a major diplomatic problem for the United States. Underlying many decisions was the belief that nuclear dominance was inborn and that a nuclear stalemate would lead to instability, one flat coat offered being that a sudden nuclear breakthrough might allow for a first strike by the Soviets. everywhere time, those encouraging this sort of arms race as if it were natural became more and more marginalized from political reality and less able to articulate a need for increasing the size of our arsenal for any reason except that doing so was what we had been doing since World War II and so should be continued.

notes, that nuclear weapons affected the behavior of nations and actually inhibited the onset of large-scale war:

Newhouse, John. War and Peace in the Nuclear Age.
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