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Browsing Public Policy Research Works by Author "Cochran, Thomas B."
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Item Toward True Security: A U.S. Nuclear Posture for the Next Decade(Union of Concerned Scientists, 2001-06) Fetter, Steve; Blair, Bruce G.; Cochran, Thomas B.; Collina, Tom Z.; Dean, Jonathan; Garwin, Richard L.; Gottfried, Kurt; Gronlund, Lisbeth; Kelly, Henry; McKinzie, Matthew G.; Norris, Robert S.; Segal, Adam; Sherman, Robert; von Hippel, Frank N.; Wright, David; Young, StephenThis report proposes a nuclear weapons policy for the United States for the next decade that reflects today’s political and strategic realities. By contrast, the official policies and doctrines of both the United States and Russia are mired in Cold War patterns of thought. Eleven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, both countries still maintain massive nuclear arsenals ready for nearly instant use. Although nuclear war plans differ in size and detail from those drawn up 20 or more years ago, their basic structure remains unchanged. The US nuclear arsenal and doctrine were designed to deter a deliberate large-scale Soviet nuclear attack on the United States and a massive Soviet conventional attack on US European allies, as well as to preserve the option of a disarming first strike against Soviet nuclear forces. This force structure and doctrine are obsolete and jeopardize American national security.Item Verifying the Authenticity of Nuclear Warheads Without Revealing Sensitive Design Information(1991-12) Fetter, Steve; Cochran, Thomas B.Verifying the dismantlement of nuclear warheads will require reconciling two conflicting objectives: the desire of the monitoring party to insure that the objects slated for dismantlement are bona fide warheads of the declared type, and the desire of the monitored party to protect sensitive information about the design of the warhead. A possible solution would involve visiting a deployment site on short notice and randomly selecting a given number of warheads for dismantlement. The warheads would then be placed in tagged, sealed containers for transport to the dismantlement facility, where the integrity of the tags and seals would be verified. If the number of warheads to be dismantled is a small fraction of the entire inventory, then the monitoring party would be reasonably sure that the warheads are genuine, for the only way the monitored party could defeat the scheme would be to deploy large numbers of fake warheads. Still, the process of on-site tagging and sealing for each warhead is tedious, and the monitored party would have no assurance that all the warheads were genuine, since the monitored party could easily replace 10 or 20 percent of the warheads slated for dismantlement with decoys. A much better solution would involve gathering only a small sample of warheads during an initial random on-site inspection and establishing a unique “fingerprint” or signature for this warhead type.