Bedeviled by a Paradox: Nitze,Bundy, and an Incipient Nuclear Norm

ABSTRACT

This article explores how two influential American policy makers—Paul Nitze and McGeorge Bundy—wrestled with the idea of a norm against the use of nuclear weapons. Existing scholarship has overlooked how both Bundy and Nitze came to understand the idea of nuclear non-use, especially related to the credibility of threats to use nuclear weapons. Using documentary evidence from their personal papers, this article illuminates the thinking of Bundy and Nitze, finding that both engaged with the idea of a norm of non-use of nuclear weapons in their strategic writing and thought.     

BRAZIL AND MEXICO IN THE NONPROLIFERATION REGIME

Latin American countries have historically followed different paths and logics toward the nonproliferation regime. Some states have unconditionally advocated for global and nonproliferation efforts, while others have vehemently opposed such measures or remained ambivalent toward the regime itself. By historically comparing two of Latin America's most influential countries—Brazil and Mexico—this study identifies the underlying domestic conditions and external influences that explain their differences in behavior and policy toward the nonproliferation regime. Because little is known about the reasons why different Latin American countries adopt these different approaches, the purpose of this article is to resolve this problem, primarily by focusing on the ways in which evolving civil-military relations and US influence have shaped nonproliferation policy preferences in Latin America. It concludes with a discussion of how these historical cases might shed light on current nonproliferation policies in Latin America.     

INDIA AND THE NEW LOOK OF U.S. NONPROLIFERATION POLICY

U.S. nuclear export policy has undergone major transformations since 1945, and the most recent change, as expressed in the July 18, 2005, India-U.S. Joint Statement, represents an especially significant shift in policy. The document reverses more than a quarter century of U.S. declaratory policy, suggesting that the current U.S. administration regards nuclear proliferation to be both inevitable and not necessarily a bad thing. This article investigates this policy shift, looking at the history of U.S. nuclear export policy and the potential ramifications of the new policy on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The author also touches on the potential effects of the Joint Statement on Indian-Pakistani relations. Finally, it is suggested that it is not too late for India and the United States to change the new policy with more consideration for the NPT and the Nuclear Suppliers Group Initiative.     

POLITICAL SURVIVAL AND NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION

Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East, by Etel Solingen. Princeton University Press, 2007. 404 pages, $26.95.     

Interval scheduling: A survey

In interval scheduling, not only the processing times of the jobs but also their starting times are given. This article surveys the area of interval scheduling and presents proofs of results that have been known within the community for some time. We first review the complexity and approximability of different variants of interval scheduling problems. Next, we motivate the relevance of interval scheduling problems by providing an overview of applications that have appeared in literature. Finally, we focus on algorithmic results for two important variants of interval scheduling problems. In one variant we deal with nonidentical machines: instead of each machine being continuously available, there is a given interval for each machine in which it is available. In another variant, the machines are continuously available but they are ordered, and each job has a given “maximal” machine on which it can be processed. We investigate the complexity of these problems and describe algorithms for their solution. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

Pakistani Political Communication and Public Opinion on US Drone Attacks

Conventional wisdom holds that Pakistanis are overwhelmingly opposed to American drone strikes in their country’s tribal areas and that this opposition is driven by mass media coverage of the loss of life and property the strikes purportedly cause. Using an approach based in the literature in political communication and public opinion, we argue this conventional wisdom is largely inaccurate. Instead, we contend that awareness of drone strikes will be limited because Pakistan is a poor country with low educational attainment, high rates of illiteracy and persistent infrastructure problems that limit access to mass media. Moreover, because of these same country characteristics, Pakistanis’ beliefs about drone strikes will be shaped primarily by informal, face-to-face political communication, rather than through more formal media sources. We test this argument using data that we collected by fielding a 7,656 respondent, nationally-representative survey carried out in Pakistan in 2013. The results of the statistical analysis support our arguments.     

An MX/G/1 queueing system with disasters and repairs under a multiple adapted vacation policy

We consider a queueing system with batch Poisson arrivals subject to disasters which occur independently according to a Poisson process but affect the system only when the server is busy, in which case the system is cleared of all customers. Following a disaster that affects the system, the server initiates a repair period during which arriving customers accumulate without receiving service. The server operates under a Multiple Adapted Vacation policy. The stationary regime of this process is analyzed using the supplementary variables method. We obtain the probability generating function of the number of customers in the system, the fraction of customers who complete service, and the Laplace transform of the system time of a typical customer in stationarity. The stability condition for the system and the Laplace transform of the time between two consecutive disasters affecting the system is obtained by analyzing an embedded Markov renewal process. The statistical characteristics of the batches that complete service without being affected by disasters and those of the partially served batches are also derived. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 171–189, 2015