Academic literature on the topic 'Nuclear weapons Social aspects Australia'

This article concludes that Australia was determined to possess nuclear weapons from the end of the Second World War. The best prospects for this lay in working with Britain through the so-called ‘joint project’. British defence planners knew that their small island would not survive a future atomic blitz and, therefore, needed ‘active’ deterrent weapons. The problem was that the US after 1946 moved to protect its atomic monopoly and denied Britain research, raw materials, and test facilities. Australia was, therefore, an invaluable partner in the British deterrent weapons programme, in all its aspects from research to testing, as long as the US refused co-operation. The quest for atomic weapons lies at the heart of many of Canberra's initiatives after 1945 – the decision to build an Australian National University; the construction of the vast Snowy Mountains scheme; and ultimately the decision to deploy Australian forces into South-East Asia in the mid-fifties. The height of Anglo-Australian co-operation coincided with the atomic tests after 1952, London's decision to help build atomic reactors in Australia, and the Suez crisis. Britain's acquisition of deterrent weapons in 1957, however, saw the end of imperial co-operation on atomic weapons and delivery systems.

In article it is shown, that the continued technological and content revolution in the means of mass communication in a number of key indicators complicates the interaction of the participants of international relations, and «information of the press» is of special importance in the modern international relations is the priority, which gives all grounds to attribute the information to the category of factors that determine the fundamental social change in the modern world. Possibilities of modern information society is not always amenable to precise forecast, the action of politicians and international organizations. The Internet space is gradually becoming the main actor in international relations, and one of the most unpleasant aspects of this process is the loss of the information society sustainability. These and other circumstances dictate the need to generate adequate effective state policy of counteraction to cyber terrorism and the development of the new «intellectual technologies» and software tools to control the «dark-web» and analysis of social networks. Social stability of the States will increasingly depend on the correct use of information where it is needed most in this political moment. In article it is shown that the information support of foreign policy and international relations of the stands in one row with such priority issues of world policy as non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, restriction and prohibition of weapons of mass destruction, settlement of regional conflicts and peace-making, strengthening of comprehensive security, the preservation of cultural heritage and promotion of human rights.

The article соnsiders the socio-cultural aspects of the standard model (SM) in elementary particle physics and history of its creation. SM is a quantum field gauge theory of electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions, which is the basis of the modern theory of elementary particles. The process of its elaboration covers a twenty-year period: from 1954 (the concept of gauge fields by C. Yang and R. Mills) to the early 1970s., when the construction of renormalized quantum chromodynamics and electroweak theory wеre completed. The socio-cultural aspects of SM are explored on the basis of a quasi-empirical approach, by studying the texts of its creators and participants in the relevant events. We note also the important role of such an “external” factor as large-scale state projects on the creation of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, which provided personnel and financial support for fundamental research in the field of nuclear physics and elementary particle physics (the implementation of thermonuclear projects took place just in the 1950s, and most of the theorists associated with the creation of SM were simultaneously the main developers of thermonuclear weapons, especially in the USSR). The formation of SM is considered as a competition between two research programs (paradigms) – gauge-field and phenomenological, associated with the rejection of the field concept. The split of the scientific community of physicists associated with this competition is going on during this period. It’s accompanied by a kind of “negotiations”, which in the early 1970s lead to the triumph of the gauge field program and the restoration of the unity of the scientific community. The norms and rules of the scientific ethos played the regulatory role in this process. The scientific-realistic position of the metaphysical attitudes of the majority of theorists and their negative attitude to the concepts of philosophical relativism and social construction of scientific knowledge are emphasized. Some features of the history of SM creation are also noted, such as the positive role of aesthetic judgments; “scientific-school” form of research (in the USSR), its pros and cons; a connection to historical-scientific “drama of ideas” with “dramas of people” who made a wrong choice and (or) “missed their opportunities”.

As adults, it is tempting to dismiss children's fears of such things as animals, the supernatural and physical events as vivid aspects of their imagination and to reassure ourselves that such fears are relatively minor or of limited concern. To this extent adults fail to realise children's fears reflect something of their understanding of the world and their place in it. To date, there has been very little research conducted in Australia on the nature and extent of children's fears. However, research conducted in the United States and Europe has identified a number of features of fears including sex differences and age trends.

The theme of war worries everyone in the modern world, it is the most dangerous and large-scale socio-political conflict that has the prospect of developing to the level of a global catastrophe, characterized as the “third world war”, “nuclear war”, “war with weapons of mass destruction”, etc. Furthermore, the theme includes the whole complex of knowledge and events that affect all spheres of social life and the scientific knowledge. Owing to its pervasive and multidimensional nature, war is studied simultaneously within the framework of military history, economic and the managerial paradigms, political-legal and the psychological realms of research. At the same time, there is almost no serious and detailed study of this type of conflict within conflictology, aimed at presenting an integrated and an interdisciplinary approach to the most dangerous form of a large-scale conflict. The article is an attempt to understand the essence and nature of war, its types and the forms of its manifestation, the foundations of war, technology for the development of this violent social-political conflict and the goals and functions it performs. The methods of theoretical analysis of a specific conflict situation, war and armed conflict, abstraction, specification, analysis, classification, procedure of terms and data operationalization and interpretation are used. Applied research methods are also used (document analysis, observation, etc.). As a result, a socio-political model for analyzing the technology of war is proposed, which characterizes its base, structural elements (tools, methods, procedures, techniques, operations), and algorithm. In conclusion, derivative knowledge about the main socio-political methods and technologies for study, analysis of modern wars and armed conflicts, their peaceful regulation and peacekeeping is proposed.

As Cold War historians and fans of the film Doctor Strangelove know, deterrence can be a tricky business. The complexity of deterrence and the lack of attention that has been paid to its social effects have too often left one of its forms – nuclear deterrence – depoliticized, uncontested, and thus a danger to us all. I argue in this article that speech act theory can provide insights into deterrence and its concomitant political effects. It can be used to philosophically explain the communicative difficulties involved in deterrent relationships, and to form a basis for a critical stance on deterrence as politics. This entails a shift of focus from deterrence as a state of mind to the politics of deterrence and the deontic powers it wields – a shift from the causative aspects of deterrence to the deontology of deterrents. The analysis of such political functions is aided by the neologism of deterrentification, which refers to assertive and declarative acts that alter the status functions of things so that they are thought to act as deterrents and bring about determent in someone or something. It also aids in conceptualizing how the status of deterrents can be cancelled, and how nuclear weapons can be drawn away from the exceptional sphere of deterrence and back into the sphere of politics. Such a status transformation is required to achieve a sustained nuclear disarmament.

The article emphasizes that the armed conflict has become a part of modern Ukraine and caused changes in all spheres of public life. This updated the scientific discourse about the nature of today's wars and their characteristics. The article emphasizes that at the present stage, the war between powerful powers is unlikely, given the potential for the use of nuclear weapons. However, the conflicts of low intensity periodically arise and continue in various parts of the world. Not only do they become constituent elements of public life, but reform the economy both at global and local level.The components of modern capitalist system are the industries that serve military needs. The income of defense corporations show high demand for their products. It is used not only by the countries that are involved in an armed confrontation, but also by other states that can be at war any moment. Locally armed confrontation is destructive for the economy of the country, focused on functioning in peacetime. Being involved into a protracted conflict entails changes in all the aspects of social life. Economic system adapts and generates new practices. Some paradoxical situations arise, so that there some opportunities to "earn" on the conflict, and therefore people who are interested in its preservation.The armed conflict in Ukraine is often called a hybrid war. Besides, in scientific discourse there are other names – the conflict in the «grey zone», «grey war», unlimited conflict, a non-conventional war as «War on behalf of». The war in Donbass is a new type of conflict. Taking into consideration its duration, it has led to the emergence of various kinds of economic practices – both legal (for example, the increase in military orders, scope services for permanently migrating displaced people, etc.), and illegal (for example, smuggling of goods across the line of demarcation). They have become a part of everyday life not only in the frontline areas of Donbass, but also of the entire country.

ATOMIC DOCTORS: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age by James L. Nolan Jr. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. 294 pages, plus index. Hardcover; $29.95. ISBN: 9780674248632. *This book ends with a tragic photograph. The reader will see a young boy carrying a sleeping infant on his back. However, the infant is not asleep but instead is dead as his brother waits his turn to have his brother's body thrown into a giant pyre at Nagasaki in the days following the atomic bomb blast. This picture is symbolic of the tragedy of war and provides a provocative statement regarding the involvement of US physicians in the development of the atomic weapons program toward the end of World War II. The author, James L. Nolan Jr., PhD (Professor of Sociology, Williams College), provides an excellent historical vignette of this period through a written biography of his grandfather, James F. Nolan, MD. *Dr. Nolan, as well as Louis Hempelmann, MD and Stafford Warren, MD, were intricately involved with the Trinity testing in New Mexico as well as with the development of the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. Dr. Nolan met and collaborated with such famous people associated with the Manhattan Project, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and General Leslie Groves. The entire group of physicians oversaw determining radiation risks during atomic bomb development and testing. This placed them in a difficult situation which "linked the arts of healing and war in ways that had little precedent" (p. 166) especially regarding the Hippocratic Oath.1 *Dr. Nolan was involved with setting up the hospital at Los Alamos as well as providing medical care for the Los Alamos staff and families. However, the job of these clinicians also had other aspects. Radiation exposure to workers was observed and recorded at Los Alamos leading to some of the initial descriptions of radiation poisoning. Additionally, the physicians were involved in determining radiation hazards associated with Los Alamos and in the setting of Trinity with most of their findings either being ignored or hidden from the public, sometimes with the complicity of these individuals. It is fascinating to consider that Dr. Nolan was one of the military personnel chosen to accompany Little Boy (the bomb that exploded over Hiroshima) to the Pacific Front at Tinian Island on the famous and later tragic USS Indianapolis. I cannot imagine, in our present time, that a physician would be charged with transporting and reporting the safety of a technologically advanced weapons system. *The book contains many fascinating stories, including how military physicians as well as other personnel were told to assert there was no significant radiation after the bombing in Japan (despite obvious radiation injury being noted in thousands of individuals), how the military allowed reporters at the Trinity test site after the bomb test with no protection except for "protective" booties, how US military physicians were told to not treat Japanese civilians after the bombing in order to circumvent moral responsibility of the bombing (this was ignored), how the inhabitants of the Bikini Atoll and Enewetak Atoll were forced to abandon their ancestral homes so that further atomic bomb testing could occur (with subsequent deleterious effects in their sociologic and health outcomes), and how patients in the United States (many who were already terminally ill) were secretly injected with plutonium to determine the effects of radiation injury. *Besides being a biography and history of a physician and his colleagues, this book also goes in some philosophical directions, including considering what is the goal of technology. Oppenheimer himself stated that "It's amazing ... how the technology tools trap one" (p. 33). The "trap" leads to a myriad of issues. Dr. Nolan believed radiation should be considered under the paradigm of an "instrumentalist view of technology" in which new technology could be used for the advancement or decline of our species. In his case, he began experimenting with radiation to treat gynecologic cancer in his patients. The book then explores "technological determinism," both optimistic and pessimistic, which is still an issue permeating our culture today. The author states that humans appear to always choose technologic advances even before fully knowing downstream economic, political, or cultural effects. Such examples cited by the author include the internet, social media, and genetic engineering. *A Christian will find this book unsettling when one considers what one prioritizes in his (her) faith. For example, one of the physicists who worked at Los Alamos was a Quaker. The Trinity test was named after the Christian Trinity (based on a John Donne sonnet). These facts are sobering when the author provides reports of "downwinders" who suffered catastrophic disease after the Trinity test as well as going into detail about the thousands of Japanese who suffered radiation poisoning after the nuclear bombing. In addition, the bombing of Nagasaki was close to the Christian part of the city resulting in the killing of most of the Christians living there. Indeed, the pursuit of science is a fascinating human endeavor, but the point of science is to objectively determine facts. Science does not necessarily provide subjectivity by itself which allows it to be influenced by meaning, moral values, and responsibility.2 In the moral arena, people with religious beliefs, including Christians, are required to influence the idea of technologic determinism in a positive direction. I highly recommend this book not only to learn about an interesting part of world history but also to appreciate the tragedy of the human condition in the setting of war. *Notes *1Michael North, translator, "Greek Medicine," History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, last updated February 7, 2012, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/greek/greek_oath.html. *2Mehdi Golshani, "Science Needs a Comprehensive Worldview," Theology and Science 18, no. 3 (2020): 438-47. *Reviewed by John F. Pohl, MD, Professor of Pediatrics, Department of Pediatrics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84113.

This paper argues for the importance of transnational memories in framing Australian anti-nuclear activism after the Fukushima disaster. Japan has loomed large in the transnational nuclear imaginary in Australia. Commemorating Hiroshima as the site of the first wartime use of nuclear weapons has been a long-standing practice in the Australian anti-nuclear movement and the day has been linked to a variety of issues including weapons and uranium mining. As Australia began exporting uranium to Japan in the 1970s, Australia-Japan relations took on a new meaning for the Indigenous traditional owners from whose land uranium was extracted. After Fukushima, these complex transnational memories formed the basis for an orientation towards Japan by Indigenous land rights activists and for the anti-nuclear movement as a whole. This paper argues that despite the tenuousness of direct organisational links between the two countries, transnational memories drove Australian anti-nuclear activists to seek connections with Japan after the Fukushima disaster. The mobilisation of these collective memories helps us to understand how transnational social movements evolve and how they construct globalisation from below in the Asia-Pacific region.

This article explores Japanese perceptions of nuclear technology from 1945 to 1956, the early stage of the introduction of nuclear technology, by using discourses of the government and of antinuclear civil movements. It is based on the theoretical framework that discourses construct social perceptions of science and technology. For this purpose, statements such as official documents of the Japanese government and declarations made by the antinuclear movement were used as main resources of analysis. This article finds that various technological aspects influenced the formation of the Japanese nuclear technological system. In addition, the Japanese government tried to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons. It tried to justify its ‘peaceful use of nuclear power’ by portraying itself as the sole victim of nuclear weapons while hiding its intention to develop nuclear weapons. Moreover, the nuclear safety myth was formed at the beginning of the introduction of nuclear technology. As a result, we can see that in Japan, the nuclear safety myth was growing from the beginning of the introduction of nuclear technology amid a dichotomous understanding of good and bad uses of nuclear power and the desire to enter an advanced state of science and technology.

This thesis examines the Menzies Government's response to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. This is the first historical investigation of the Crisis in the context of Australian-American relations. Its primary objective, therefore, is to fill a historiographical gap in Australia's Cold War history.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
In the early 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower encouraged citizens to “Wake Up! Sign Up! Look Up!” to the Soviet atomic threat by joining the Ground Observer Corps (GOC). Established by the United States Air Force (USAF), the GOC involved civilian volunteers surveying the skies for Soviet aircraft via watchtowers, alerting the Air Force if they suspected threatening aircraft. This thesis examines the 1950s response to the longstanding problem posed by the invention of any new weapon: how to adapt defensive technology to meet the potential threat. In the case of the early Cold War period, the GOC was the USAF’s best, albeit faulty, defense option against a weapon that did not discriminate between soldiers and citizens and rendered traditional ground troops useless. After the Korean War, Air Force officials promoted the GOC for its espousal of volunteerism and individualism. Encouraged to take ownership of the program, observers appropriated the GOC for their personal and community needs, comprised of social gatherings and policing activities, thus greatly expanding the USAF’s original objectives.

This chapter explores the pacifism of the early Christian church and how the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century led to the development of the just war doctrine. At the conclusion of World War II, the advent of the nuclear arms race rendered some aspects of the just war doctrine obsolete. Pope John XXIII addressed these concerns in his encyclical Pacem in Terris, released in 1963. Numerous Catholic peace groups thought that the Vatican did not take a strong enough stance on war, militarism, and nuclear weapons. The Catholic Worker movement called for a return to pacifism and introduced the techniques of nonviolent noncooperation with civil defense drills in the 1950s. The chapter covers other Catholic peace movements and organizations, including Pax Christi, the Catholic Left that opposed the Vietnam War through draft card burnings and draft board raids, and the Plowshares movement, whose members damaged nuclear weapons to obstruct the nuclear arms race. Eventually, the US Catholic Bishops released the pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace, which condemned nuclear weapons and called for disarmament.

Abstract This chapter explores how opposition to nuclear weapons has evolved since 1945. Looking at local, national, and international efforts of anti-nuclear activists, it investigates the various ways civil society has lobbied, educated, and protested as they advocated solutions to the dangers of the development, testing, and potential use of nuclear weapons. This is a history rooted in the national and international politics of the Cold War; yet the impact of nuclear weapons extends to the present. Canvassing national and transnational activism in the United States, western Europe, India, New Zealand, and Australia, this chapter considers how individuals, organizations, and campaigns engaged in various forms of activism as they sought different solutions to the dangers of nuclear weapons. It looks at how campaigners explored the political, diplomatic, military, economic, technological, and social influences that shape how nuclear weapons have been perceived around the world, and how solutions to their control have been campaigned for, dissected, and abandoned. Over time, individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds have explored how to confront the world’s nuclear powers; largely, thus far, most have been unable to dismantle our nuclear arsenals.