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about the nuclear arms race is that it's totally tied up in the problem of conventional war. That's what people have not realized yet. That's where our education hasn't gotten up to that point yet. At the end of World War II, or even going back further to the creation of nuclear weapons; United States started a nuclear program in the middle of World War II out of fear that Germany might have a nuclear program. But in the spring of 1945 when Germany was defeated and we discovered they did not have a nuclear program, our program didn't end. It went right ahead. We made the first three nuclear bombs. We tested one in the desert in Alamogordo and we used the other two on Japanese cities ostensibly in order to end a non-nuclear conventional war. So right from the very beginning our nuclear policy has been tied up with fears of non-nuclear conventional warfare. In the 1950's, the United States had
Summary
Dr. Randall Forsberg was executive director of the think tank she founded in 1980, the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies... more
Date Created
03/03/1988
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War and Peace in the Nuclear Age / Visions of War and Peace
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rather proud that we had taken on the biggest military power in South Asia in our region. And at that time we thought we'd won the war. And later on we thought -- we discovered India thought just the same, that they had won the war. It was a drawn war but there was a feeling of, this. And we are very proud of what we had achieved. Our troops had fought magnificently. We'd taken on a military power much bigger than our own and had the war ending in a draw and I think it was quite an achievement for us. So much for '65, let's have a special South Asian NPT. If you don't like the idea of signing the NPT because you don't agree with the American policies or British policies. Let's have a South Asian NPT. We didn't sign it because India did not sign it. We were not going to accept
Summary
Agha Ibrahim Akram was a lieutenant general who served in the Pakistan Army during the 1965 and 1971 wars with India. The interview Akram conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age concentrates on the history of tension and conflict between Pakistan and India... more
Date Created
02/09/1987
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War and Peace in the Nuclear Age / Carter's New World
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of the bomb to South Asia and that shadow is still there. How could your capability to have nuclear facilities threaten India? How could that make India stop? I was going to come to that toward the end. Why did, of strategic implication in South Asia. After the '74 explosion at Pokhran in India. We suddenly realized that warfare from now on might not be as simple and as, as a gentlemen's war as in the past. It had been a gentlemen's war with India and Pakistan. We suddenly realized, weapons out of South Asia. We will sign it not today but this morning in this half an hour if India will sign it. The only thing that will prevent us from signing the b... the, the treaty is the fact that India has not signed it. We are for it in terms of preventing
Summary
Agha Ibrahim Akram was a lieutenant general who served in the Pakistan Army during the 1965 and 1971 wars with India. The interview Akram conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age concentrates on the history of tension and conflict between Pakistan and India... more
Date Created
02/09/1987
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War and Peace in the Nuclear Age / Carter's New World
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't just make two bombs, then stop. And both countries will be caught in this nuclear rush. And by the end of the century we will have a kind of South Asian MAD. And we'll say both are nuclear powers able to destroy each other and we'll be s... weill, we'll both have destroyed, . And we know that if we go nuclear India will go nuclear. The two countries -- we are the protagonists of South Asia. We'll actually cross the threshold together or not cross it at all. If they go nuclear we will too. What would be the consequences, or Yellow bomb. It is just a bomb like any other bomb. Could you comment on the application of the theory of nuclear deterrence being applied in South Asia? Do you see that as a possibility? I see uh, an advanced stage of nuclear
Summary
Agha Ibrahim Akram was a lieutenant general who served in the Pakistan Army during the 1965 and 1971 wars with India. The interview Akram conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age concentrates on the history of tension and conflict between Pakistan and India... more
Date Created
02/09/1987
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Video, Transcript
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War and Peace in the Nuclear Age / Carter's New World
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the countries had any plans to provide. And in order to deal with that uh, uh, gap, so to speak, that disparity, uh, we planned to rely on the nuclear weapons that were then coming into existence, recognizing that if those weapons were ever used against a massed attacking force, , action making clear a, a threat of possible nuclear uh use in Korea in order to bring that uh war to an end. Do you
Summary
As staff secretary to President Dwight Eisenhower from 1954 to 1961, General Andrew Goodpaster was the person most privy to Eisenhower’s thinking and key decisions during his White House years. Goodpaster began his long affiliation with Eisenhower as a staff officer under his leadership of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), and he went on to become the president’s right-hand man on security matters... more
Date Created
03/25/1986
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War and Peace in the Nuclear Age / Bigger Bang for the Buck, A
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never talked about ending the production of nuclear weapons, to a nation where we almost had the House on record supporting it. A new freeze resolution was introduced in Congress in both Houses, a sort of slightly revised version, was introduced in both Houses in the spring of 1983 and in between we had, . But as a mass...as something which resonates with great popularity among the American people, it seems to me that SDI has as much support. I mean, the idea is that President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative is also immensely popular with people. Did he kind of coopt the ground, did he kind of seize
Summary
Dr. Randall Forsberg was executive director of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, a think tank she founded in 1980 with the aim of reducing the risk of war and minimizing the burden of U.S. military spending... more
Date Created
11/09/1987
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War and Peace in the Nuclear Age / Missile Experimental
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. So do you have a comment on conservatives calling arms control a lollipop for the masses? Um, in, into the arsenals on the two sides along, in large numbers and shorter-range nuclear weapons -- there is innovation and new technology. So its really just a way of leading people to believe that we've taken a major step down the road toward disarmament when in fact its a kind of cul de sac, it's a, it's a dead end
Summary
Dr. Randall Forsberg was executive director of the think tank she founded in 1980, the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies... more
Date Created
03/03/1988
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War and Peace in the Nuclear Age / Visions of War and Peace
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President Johnson in the White House, he was of course, uh astounded and uh, and terribly unhappy for various reasons. The end of the conversation was uh, far more encouraging than the beginning. What had happened in the meantime. I was in a position to tell him, General De Gaulle doesn't ask you, Mr, . S...s... simply because if the reason, the reasoning mass, if aggression, aggression pays this time, there will be another aggression. And possibly or likely an aggression against us. It was all as simple as all that. So the problem is to make sure that the aggression will not be. And then decide
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Maurice Schumann was French deputy foreign minister from 1951 to 1954 and foreign minister from 1969 to 1973. The interview Schumann conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age sheds light on how nuclear weapons shape relations between both allies and adversaries. In the aftermath of World War II, he recalls, France resisted proposals to remilitarize Germany and ultimately rejected the proposal for a European Defense Community that emerged from the 1952 Lisbon conference... more
Date Created
11/04/1986
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War and Peace in the Nuclear Age / Education of Robert McNamara, The
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relationship with Secretary Vance, and the discussions were spirited and I think uh, in most cases, even entertaining. He obviously uh, was quite contemptuous of our proposal. He made no bones about that. But he also made it very clear that this was not the end of the discussions. And that he was very, . In '78 the Soviets were quite active in South Yemen and Ethiopia. What were they up to? I think that they were again, uh, finding targets of opportunity to extend their influence. I, border, and invading part of Ethiopia, the Soviets took advantage of that situation, I think to gain quite significant influence in Ethiopia. At the same time, there was this instability between North Yemen and South Yemen. And the Soviets, I thought, again, tried to take advantage of a local conflict
Summary
Paul Warnke was chief negotiator for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) II during the Jimmy Carter administration and director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1977 to 1979... more
Date Created
11/19/1986
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War and Peace in the Nuclear Age / Have and Have-nots
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mind putting your pen in your pocket. In 1962, uh, there was a--a bomber I believe, a B-47 bomber which was carrying a--a nuclear bomb that uh, crashed in I think South Carolina, number of them, say 300. uh...delivered on almost any set of target in the Soviet Union, would destroy the Soviet Union and...and similarly a small percentage of the Soviet force which was much smaller than ours at the end of the '60 but must have been on the order of -- oh, I've forgotten --say 1500
Summary
When Robert McNamara moved from president of Ford Motor Company to secretary of defense in 1961, he brought his very active management control and systems-planning philosophy to the Kennedy administration. Reports from mid October 1962 confirmed that the Soviet Union was installing intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, ninety miles off the shore of Florida... more
Date Created
03/28/1986
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War and Peace in the Nuclear Age / At the Brink