Required Reading: 

    • Fred Kaplan, “The Wizards of Armageddon” (Stanford Press, 1991) [FK]
    • Brad Roberts, “The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in The 21st Century” (Stanford Press, 2016) [BR]
    • Vipin Narang, “Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era” (Princeton University Press, 2014) [VN]
  • Wendy Sherman, “Not for the Faint of Heart” (Public Affairs Books, 2018) [WS]

NSSC will be broadcasting this course live at this link on Mondays and Wednesdays at 2:00 pm PST.

Recorded classes are available below:

1.23.19 – Class One, an introduction.

  • Reading: FK p. 1-32

1.28.19 – Video: How the US got the bomb I; Tech. Lect. 1: Energy, Mass-Energy

1.30.19 – How the US got the bomb II

2.4.19 – Atoms, Nuclei, Binding Energy

2.6.19 – Nuclear Weapons & the Cold War I Tech. Lect. 3: Radioactivity, Fission

2.11.19 – Nuclear Weapons & the Cold War II; Tech. Lect 4: Nuclear Reactions, Cross Sections

2.13.19 – Nuclear Weapons & the Cold War III; Tech. Lect. 5: Reactions

2.20.19 – Tech. Lect. 6: Nuclear Weapons (i) – Physics

2.25.19 –Tech. Lect. 7: Stockpile, Testings

2.27.19 – Two Stage Weapons. The nuclear proliferation challenge and the
spread of nuclear technology

3.4.19 – Where does the fuel come from? & Nuclear Policy History

3.6.19 – Where does the fuel come from? Cont. 

3.18.19 – Nuclear Security Policy Lecture

  • Reading: p. 222-312

3.20.19 – Guest Lecture from George Moore of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

4.1.19 – Guest Lecture from Brad Roberts, Center for Global Security Research

4.3.19 – The Effects of Nuclear Weapons

4.8.19 – Nuclear Explosion Monitoring from WWII to Today

4.10.19 – The Iran Case

See course from Spring 2018 here.

See course from Spring 2017 here.