Nuclear Strategy and Weapons

Washington, D.C., April 2001 – The Bush administration is in the midst of a nuclear posture review. In his May 1 speech, President George W. Bush announced his support for missile defense and cuts in weapons, but his announcement did not refer to the alert posture of U.S. strategic forces. In a major campaign speech on nuclear weapons policy that he delivered in May 2000, then-presidential candidate Bush addressed concerns about the instant-reaction status of U.S. strategic nuclear forces.

Washington, D.C., December 18, 2000 – President Clinton's decision in September to postpone deployment of a National Missile Defense (NMD) system puts the issue in the lap of the next president, George W. Bush. A strong advocate of NMD, Bush has argued that "America must build effective missile defenses based on the best available options at the earlier possible date." However, he has not yet publicly discussed the intractable technical and political problems raised by NMD that, so far, are without solution.

Washington, D.C., May 24, 2000 – The release of Cold War-era Soviet and East European documents on war plans and nuclear planning raises questions about U.S. war planning during the same period. A central issue is the degree to which U.S. and NATO planning posited early or initial use of nuclear weapons like the 1964 Warsaw Pact plan from the Czech archives.

Washington, D.C., December 13, 1999 – For more than 40 years, the United States has kept secret the fact that it once deployed nuclear weapons on two Japanese islands, Chichi Jima and Iwo Jima, according to an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' January/February 2000 issue. The article, by three noted nuclear weapons analysts, is a follow up to their article in the November/December 1999 Bulletin about the history of the deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in 27 countries and territories around the globe.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - 20 March 1998 -- Recently declassified U.S. government documents, now published by the National Security Archive disclose one of the Cold War's deepest secrets, that during the most dangerous phases of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation during the early 1960s top military commanders had presidentially-authorized instructions providing advance authority to use nuclear weapons under specified emergency conditions.

The National Security Archive is today releasing on its World Wide Web site a set of recently-declassified U.S. documents obtained by Dr. Robert Wampler, Director of the Archive's U.S.-Japan Project, which shed important new light upon the role Okinawa and U.S. military bases on that island have played in U.S.-Japanese relations and American strategy in the Pacific. These documents were in part the basis for a documentary entitled "The Truth About the Okinawan Reversion After 25 Years: The Role of U.S.