Nuclear-weapons design and testing
China's nuclear arsenal has long been an enigma. It is a small force, based almost exclusively on land-based ballistic missiles, maintained at a low level of alert and married to a no-first-use doctrine – all choices that would seem to invite attack in a crisis. Chinese leaders, when they have spoken about nuclear weapons, have articulated ideas that sound odd to the Western ear. Mao Zedong's oft-quoted remark that ‘nuclear weapons are a paper tiger’ seems to be bluster or madness. China's nuclear forces are now too important to remain a mystery. Yet Westerners continue to disagree about basic factual information concerning one of the world's most important nuclear-weapons states. This Adelphi book documents and explains the evolution of China's nuclear forces in terms of historical, bureaucratic and ideological factors. There is a strategic logic at work, but that logic is mediated through politics, bureaucracy and ideology. The simplest explanation is that Chinese leaders, taken as a whole, have tended to place relatively little emphasis on the sort of technical details that dominated US discussions regarding deterrence. Such profound differences in thinking about nuclear weapons could lead to catastrophic misunderstanding in the event of a military crisis between Beijing and Washington.
The radioactive signature of the hydrogen bomb
It has long been supposed that the Teller‐Ulam invention of February 1951, that made the construction of a full‐scale fusion device feasible could be deduced from a careful analysis of the debris that scatters worldwide after an atmospheric test. This was part of the theme of an article in the January/February 1990 issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists written by Daniel Hirsch and William G. Mathews.1 Their conclusion, arrived at to a large degree through interviews with Hans Bethe, was that the H‐bomb secret was given to the Soviets, not through the spy Klaus Fuchs, but rather by carrying out Mike, the first test of a fusion device based on the Teller‐Ulam ideas. The Bulletin article and an extended version of that paper issued by the Los Angeles based Committee to Bridge the Gap2 argue that the observation of the very high neutron fluencies in the explosion, which can be derived from the fallout composition, would lead a competent scientist to the trick. In the present paper it is proposed that thi...
Responsive Ethics and the War Against Terrorism: A Levinasian Perspective
Realist and liberal understandings of ethics as the dominant approaches to ethics in international relations are unable to respond efficiently to the call of the other in the age of war against terrorism as they revolve around the needs and the interests of the self. Such self-centred understandings of ethics cannot respond to the other ethically and respect the other in its otherness. Therefore, in this work I attempt to develop responsive ethics by drawing on Levinasian ethics which can create the possibilities of concrete non-violent responses to the other in the age of war against terrorism.