Search results for ""Author George H. Quester""

This provocative and timely work examines various scenarios in which the deployment of nuclear weapons could occur, the probable consequences of such an escalation, the likely world reactions, and the plausible policy ramifications. Rather than projecting the physical damage that would result from nuclear attacks, George H. Quester offers an exploration of the political, psychological, and social aftermath of nuclear conflict. The prospect of nuclear attack-sixty years after atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki-is difficult to confront on many levels. We may avoid the discussion for emotional reasons, for fear of generating a self-confirming hypothesis, or simply because of the general "nuclear taboo." But there are also self-denying propositions to be harnessed here: if the world gives some advance thought to how nuclear weapons might be used again, such attacks may be headed off. If the world avoids nuclear weapons use until the year 2045, it will be able to celebrate one hundred years of nuclear concord. Quester suggests that this may be achieved through the careful consideration of possible nuclear deployment scenarios and their consequences. In this insightful analysis, he provides a starting point for informed and focused reflection and preparation.

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This provocative and timely work examines various scenarios in which the deployment of nuclear weapons could occur, the probable consequences of such an escalation, the likely world reactions, and the plausible policy ramifications. Rather than projecting the physical damage that would result from nuclear attacks, George H. Quester offers an exploration of the political, psychological, and social aftermath of nuclear conflict. The prospect of nuclear attack-sixty years after atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki-is difficult to confront on many levels. We may avoid the discussion for emotional reasons, for fear of generating a self-confirming hypothesis, or simply because of the general "nuclear taboo." But there are also self-denying propositions to be harnessed here: if the world gives some advance thought to how nuclear weapons might be used again, such attacks may be headed off. If the world avoids nuclear weapons use until the year 2045, it will be able to celebrate one hundred years of nuclear concord. Quester suggests that this may be achieved through the careful consideration of possible nuclear deployment scenarios and their consequences. In this insightful analysis, he provides a starting point for informed and focused reflection and preparation.

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Throughout the decades of the Cold War, people all around the world lived in fear of thermonuclear war. To assuage that fear theorists of deterrence explained over and over again that both sides had to be able to retaliate with mutual assured destruction, to keep nuclear weapons from being used. Yet this basic fact of nuclear deterrence begs the question: What deterred the United States from a preemptive strike before 1949 when Joseph Stalin''s Soviet Union had not yet acquired nuclear weapons of its own? In Nuclear Monopoly George Quester sets forth the case for preventive war using rudimentary atomic weapons to avoid the possibility of a future war in which both sides would have used hydrogen bombs.Quester demonstrates that the notion of mutual assured destruction was rooted in the questionable assumption that assured destruction must be mutual and that the United States of course would never consider preventive war. He explores the logic of these assumptions again

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