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Nuclear blackmail is a form of nuclear strategy in which one of states uses the threat of use of nuclear weapons to force an adversary to perform some action or make some concessions. It is a type of extortion that is related to brinkmanship.
In 1950, US president Harry S. Truman publicly stated that the use of nuclear weapons was under "active consideration" against Chinese targets during the Korean War. [1] [2] [3] [4]
In 1953, US president Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened the use of nuclear weapons to end the Korean War if the Chinese refused to negotiate. [5] [6] [7]
In order to support the continued existence of the Republic of China government, the United States issued several nuclear threats against the People's Republic of China in the 1950s to force the evacuation of outlying islands and the cessation of attacks against Quemoy and Matsu. [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
Declassified documents from the UK National Archives indicate that the United Kingdom considered threatening China with nuclear retaliation in 1961 in the event of a military reclamation of Hong Kong by China. [13]
In 1969 and onwards, US president Richard Nixon indirectly threatened North Vietnam with nuclear weapons via his madman theory .
In 1981, the US Department of Energy said there had been 75 cases of people attempting nuclear blackmail against the US but only several were serious attempts. [14]
In 1991, Israel threatened Iraq with a "nuclear counter-response" if there was an attack using chemical weapons during the Gulf War. [15]
In 2002, the George W. Bush administration declared that it was prepared to strike with nuclear missiles against Iraq if biological or chemical weapons were used against American troops or their allies during the Iraq War. [16]
In 2005, Chinese major general Zhu Chenghu said that China might retaliate with nuclear weapons if the United States attacked Chinese forces in a conflict over Taiwan. [17]
On January 2, 2018, US president Donald Trump threatened North Korea by pointing out that the US has much more nuclear firepower than North Korea, in response to a press release stating that a "nuclear button is on Kim Jong-un's desk at all times." [18]
On February 24, 2022, in the TV address where Vladimir Putin announced Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Putin warned that any countries interfering would face consequences they had never encountered in their history. This was widely interpreted as being a threat of nuclear attack. Several days later, Putin put Russia's nuclear forces on a higher state of alert. [19] [20] United States warned Russia of "catastrophic" consequences for Russia if Russia uses any nuclear weapons after setbacks in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. [21]
Nuclear warfare, also known as atomic warfare, is a military conflict or prepared political strategy that deploys nuclear weaponry. Nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction; in contrast to conventional warfare, nuclear warfare can produce destruction in a much shorter time and can have a long-lasting radiological result. A major nuclear exchange would likely have long-term effects, primarily from the fallout released, and could also lead to secondary effects, such as "nuclear winter", nuclear famine, and societal collapse. A global thermonuclear war with Cold War-era stockpiles, or even with the current smaller stockpiles, may lead to various scenarios including the human extinction.
In nuclear strategy, minimal deterrence, also known as minimum deterrence and finite deterrence, is an application of deterrence theory in which a state possesses no more nuclear weapons than is necessary to deter an adversary from attacking. Pure minimal deterrence is a doctrine of no first use, holding that the only mission of nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear adversary by making the cost of a first strike unacceptably high. To present a credible deterrent, there must be the assurance that any attack would trigger a retaliatory strike. In other words, minimal deterrence requires rejecting a counterforce strategy in favor of pursuing survivable force that can be used in a countervalue second strike.
World War III, also known as the Third World War, is a hypothetical future global conflict subsequent to World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945). It is widely assumed that such a war would involve all of the great powers, like its predecessors, as well as the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, thus surpassing prior conflicts in geographic scope, devastation, and loss of life.
Daniel Ellsberg was an American political activist, economist, and United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, he precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers.
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. During this same period, in addition to the American and Soviet nuclear stockpiles, other countries developed nuclear weapons, though no other country engaged in warhead production on nearly the same scale as the two superpowers.
The Russian Federation is known to possess or have possessed three types of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and chemical weapons. It is one of the five nuclear-weapon states recognized under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
The United States is known to have possessed three types of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The U.S. is the only country to have used nuclear weapons on another country, when it detonated two atomic bombs over two Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. It had secretly developed the earliest form of the atomic weapon during the 1940s under the title "Manhattan Project". The United States pioneered the development of both the nuclear fission and hydrogen bombs. It was the world's first and only nuclear power for four years, from 1945 until 1949, when the Soviet Union produced its own nuclear weapon. The United States has the second-largest number of nuclear weapons in the world, after the Russian Federation.
The People's Republic of China has developed and possesses weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and nuclear weapons. The first of China's nuclear weapons tests took place in 1964, and its first hydrogen bomb test occurred in 1966 at Lop Nur. Tests continued until 1996, when the country signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), but did not ratify it. China acceded to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1984 and ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in 1997.
Deterrence is a 1999 political thriller drama film written and directed by Rod Lurie, depicting fictional events about nuclear brinkmanship. It marks the feature directorial debut of Lurie, who was previously a film critic for the New York Daily News, Premiere Magazine, Entertainment Weekly and Movieline, among others. Kevin Pollak, Timothy Hutton, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Sean Astin star. The film is an international co-production between France and the United States. It premiered at the 1999 Toronto International Film Festival, and was released in the United States on March 10, 2000, by Paramount Classics.
Iran is not known to currently possess weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and has signed treaties repudiating the possession of WMD including the Biological Weapons Convention, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran has first-hand knowledge of WMD effects—over 100,000 Iranian troops and civilians were victims of chemical weapons during the 1980s Iran–Iraq War.
The United States was the first country to manufacture nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in combat, with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. Before and during the Cold War, it conducted 1,054 nuclear tests, and tested many long-range nuclear weapons delivery systems.
A tactical nuclear weapon (TNW) or non-strategic nuclear weapon (NSNW) is a nuclear weapon that is designed to be used on a battlefield in military situations, mostly with friendly forces in proximity and perhaps even on contested friendly territory. Generally smaller in explosive power, they are defined in contrast to strategic nuclear weapons, which are designed mostly to be targeted at the enemy interior far away from the war front against military bases, cities, towns, arms industries, and other hardened or larger-area targets to damage the enemy's ability to wage war. As of 2024, no tactical nuclear weapons have ever been used in combat.
The United States and Russia maintain one of the most important, critical, and strategic foreign relations in the world. Both nations have shared interests in nuclear safety and security, nonproliferation, counterterrorism, and space exploration. Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, relations became very tense after the United States imposed sanctions against Russia. Russia placed the United States on a list of "unfriendly countries", along with South Korea, Taiwan, European Union members, NATO members, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Micronesia, Japan and Ukraine.
The B90 Nuclear Depth Strike Bomb (NDSB) was an American thermonuclear bomb designed at Lawrence Livermore National Labs in the mid-to-late 1980s and cancelled prior to introduction into military service due to the end of the Cold War.
The Samson Option is Israel's deterrence strategy of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons as a "last resort" against a country whose military has invaded and/or destroyed much of Israel. Commentators also have employed the term to refer to situations where non-nuclear, non-Israeli actors have threatened conventional weapons retaliation.
This timeline of nuclear weapons development is a chronological catalog of the evolution of nuclear weapons rooting from the development of the science surrounding nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. In addition to the scientific advancements, this timeline also includes several political events relating to the development of nuclear weapons. The availability of intelligence on recent advancements in nuclear weapons of several major countries is limited because of the classification of technical knowledge of nuclear weapons development.
Hans Møller Kristensen is director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. He writes about nuclear weapons policy there; he is coauthor of the Nuclear Notebook column in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the World Nuclear Forces appendix in Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's annual SIPRI Yearbook.
This article shows various estimates of the nuclear weapon stockpiles of various countries at various points in time. This article also shows the number of nuclear weapons tests conducted by each country at various points in time.
During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, several senior Russian politicians, including president Vladimir Putin, former president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, and foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, have made a number of statements widely seen as nuclear blackmail. The possibility of Russia using tactical nuclear weapons, and the risk of broader nuclear escalation, has been widely discussed by commentators and in the media. By 2024, many of the Russian government's "red lines" had been crossed without nuclear weapons being used in response. As well as nuclear weapons threats, the Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has led to a crisis over the safety of the plant and the risk of a nuclear disaster.