RAND Corporation (for the US Air Force)
Diffusion of nuclear weapons to additional countries: the ‘nth country’ problem (RAND RM-2484)
Study · written 15 February 1960 · released 15 February 1960
Why this matters
A 1960 RAND study, done for the Air Force, of how and how fast nuclear weapons would spread beyond the first nuclear powers. It is one of the founding texts of nonproliferation thinking, written before France, China, Israel or India had a bomb. Useful for checking what analysts predicted against what actually happened.
Read the original
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/544438
Hosted by OSTI.GOV
Tags
Part of a collection · step 5 of 15
The Nuclear Paper Trail
1960: RAND asks who gets the bomb next.
Part of a collection · step 6 of 7
South Asia in the Files
The 1960 forecast of which countries would go nuclear.
Cite
RAND Corporation (for the US Air Force). "Diffusion of nuclear weapons to additional countries: the ‘nth country’ problem (RAND RM-2484)." 15 February 1960. Released 15 February 1960. https://www.osti.gov/biblio/544438 (accessed via The Quiet Archive, QA-0033).
Shelved nearby
- 1967 QA-0054LLNL · Briefing book
The 1960s ‘Nth Country Experiment’ (Lawrence Livermore)
In the mid-1960s Livermore asked a few young physicists with no access to classified weapons data to design a nuclear bomb from open literature alone.