Nuclear Weapons that Went to War

William Yengst, Stephen Lukasik and Mark Jensen have examined the impact of nuclear weapons in an array of crisis and conflict situations throughout history. The report does not address the Cold War competition between the US and USSR, and is based entirely on data and information from unclassified sources.

Special thanks to the authors for their comprehensive work, and to Bob Zarate of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center for making the report available electronically.

Full Report

The full report (458 pages, 23 MB) is available for download by clicking here.

Case by Case

Each of the 16 individual cases examined in the report can be downloaded by using the links below:

• Introduction and table of contents
• Executive summary
• Application of Nuclear Weapons Against Japan (1945)
• Nuclear Weapons for the Korean War (1950-1953)
• Nuclear Weapons for Dien Bien Phu (1954)
• Suez: Nuclear Threat after a Lightning War (1954)
• Lebanon: Acting from a Position of Strength (1958)
• The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
• Nuclear Weapons and the Assault on the Liberty (1967)
• The Capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo (1968)
• Nuclear Weapons for the Battle of Khe Sanh (1968)
• Sino-Soviet Border Dispute Initiates a Nuclear Threat (1969)
• Israeli Nuclear Weapons and the "October War" (1973)
• South African Nuclear Weapons to Deter Communist Angola (1984)
• Soviet Nuclear Weapons Deployment in Afghanistan (1979-1987)
• Nuclear Weapons in the Falkland Islands (1982)
• Nuclear Weapon Considerations during Desert Storm (1991)
• Taiwan Dilemma (1958, 1996)
• References, Appendix A, Table A-1