Nuclear weapons represent the ultimate defense of the nation, a deterrent against any and all potential adversaries. Combined with diplomacy and conventional military capabilities, nuclear weapons have helped to avoid a large-scale conflict between leading world powers for over fifty years.

Maintaining effective nuclear deterrence As NATO’s heads of state and government have agreed – and often reiterate – NATO’s nuclear weapons are intended to “preserve peace, prevent coercion, and deter aggression”.

Known as the “Ground-based Midcourse Defense” (GMD), the system’s basic premise is simple: incoming warheads are tracked by radar and satellite and targeted by defensive “interceptor” missiles, launched from the bases in Alaska and California—a task sometimes described as “hitting a bullet with a bullet.”

The deterrence dilemma also accounts for U.S. enthu- siasm, as well as a general lack thereof of Europeans, for a reduction of the yield of tactical nuclear weapons and for an increase in their limited-war-fighting capability (the latest example of which is the neutron bomb}.

The logic of deterrence, like that of chess, is much more complicated than the basic principles that define it. Deterrence implies the existence of two parties, the deterrer and the deterree. Its object is to stop the deterree from taking actions against the interests of the deterrer.

Class 12thPolitical Science – Board Papers. Answer : The Cold War was based on the ‘logic of deterrence’ which implied that the two super powers USA and the USSR armed with nuclear weapons involved, were involved in an intense rivalry but both were logical and responsible enough to avoid all-out warfare.

Wilkie Collins

Mutually assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender (see pre-emptive nuclear strike and second strike).

The development of weapons sufficiently enormous for commonly guaranteed devastation seen as an approach to protect peace is on the grounds that the knowledge that both sides would absolutely be decimated in any hard and fast war would keep either side from beginning threats.

During the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union became engaged in a nuclear arms race. They both spent billions and billions of dollars trying to build up huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

The nuclear arm race was a competition between the USA and the USSR. Who ever on would get power over the nuclear warfare. the first nuclear weapon was created by the Manhattan project during the second world war. It was an atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki japan.

The nuclear arms race was an arms race competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies during the Cold War.