Understanding Nuclear Forces

After the Cold War, the United States chose to largely ignore nuclear weapons as a national security issue for three decades—the end of the Cold War seemed to make nuclear weapon threats unlikely. But developing threats by Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, combined with the long delayed U.S. nuclear modernization efforts, have caused nuclear weapons to become a major national security issue which many in the national security community do not really understand.

This course provides an introduction to nuclear weapons, including their past, present, and likely future roles and strategies. It illustrates the weapons themselves, the nature of the developing threats, the analytic procedures used to estimate nuclear weapon effects, the logic of deterrence and nuclear weapon employment, the ongoing U.S. modernization efforts, and the potential requirements for U.S. nuclear weapons in the future. The course will be interactive and will include students preparing a short policy paper on a nuclear weapon force issue of their choosing.