https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/26609/risk-analysis-methods-for-nuclear-war-and-nuclear-terrorism
Comment: Started looking at over 900 missile as search term documents from the National Academies, this one from 2023 is a timely and interesting read for any missileer from any time of serving and is especially relevant to today's world tensions.
Quote:
The assessment of risk is complex and often controversial. It is derived from the existence of a hazard, and it is characterized by the uncertainty of possible undesirable events and their outcomes. Few outcomes are as undesirable as nuclear war and nuclear terrorism. Over the decades, much has been written about particular situations, policies, and weapons that might affect the risks of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism. The nature of the concerns and the risk analysis methods used to evaluate them have evolved considerably over time.
Quote from pages 26 and 27:
One early U.S. response to the Soviet collapse was the Cooperative Threat Reduction program and related efforts in the U.S. Department of State, in which the United States provided funding to work cooperatively with Russia and the other states of the former Soviet Union (and, eventually, elsewhere) to dismantle and secure the nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and materials remaining from the Cold War.3 Few, if any, unclassified assessments sought to understand how these initiatives affected the risks of nuclear war; rather, attention was focused on engineering, cost, and political assessments of particular projects and how they could best be accomplished.
In 1992, the Strategic Air Command and the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (the staff created to build the U.S. nuclear war plans) at Offutt Air Force Base were disestablished, and the U.S. Strategic Command was created. The United States signed START II with the Russian Federation in 1993, in which they agreed to eliminate all multiple-warhead land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. Strategic exchange assessments indicated this would have been a major step forward for crisis stability, since in any attack on single-warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles, the attacker would be disarmed as rapidly as the victim, offering no advantage to a first nuclear strike. Unfortunately, however, the treaty never was implemented.
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3 In 1994 as part of the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine gave up its Soviet nuclear weapons. In exchange, Ukrainian geopolitical borders were recognized and the country was to receive protection from the use of military force or economic sanctions by the Russian Federation, the United States, and the United Kingdom (Memorandum on Security Assurances in Connection with Ukraine’s Accession to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Budapest, December 5, 1994).
Citation:
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2023. Risk Analysis Methods for Nuclear War and Nuclear Terrorism. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/26609
