20 year old college student here. Pretty damn new to reddit and having to think so abstractly so I haven't been able to find very good places on the internet for this kinda thing. Rather curious myself about this topic, and it proved to be a good topic for my classes final paper.
So far all I have been able to find is Eisenhower's farewell address and a retelling of nuclear armaments history from nobelprize.org. I understand the Military Industrial Complex has a lot do with it but finding any good peer reviewed articles via my college's library has proved a little more than difficult.
I want to understand at what point humans agreed: This will be for war, not so we can start building utopias.
Any queries that I could use to find more information or websites would be highly appreciated. Note: High quality sources online are things with a .org or .gov URL. Source articles like Eisenhower's speech, peer reviewed articles, or books.
Prior thanks for any help or taking the time to consider it! Note: Apologies for the shameless inquiry, I don't wish to have reddit write my paper for me, I just can't find more than something that doesn't immediately reinforce the M.A.D. doctrine.
Hello there. Your question seems to be related to coursework, so we just want to remind you, and any potential respondents, that our rules DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself (which is what you seem to be doing, so no worries!).
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Just a quick book recommendation: Eric Schlosser's Command and Control is a very readable, fairly comprehensive history of the nuclear arms race. It is mostly through the lens of how you make sure the weapons aren't used when they ought not be and can be used when you want them to be, but it does a very good job at replicating the mindset of the people who made the weapons, the people at the top who had to wrestle with their implications, and the shifts in thinking about the weapons that took place. It is engagingly written and a reliable source.
If you want to get into the weeds on different doctrines, Lawrence Freedman's The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy is sort of the main book on that particular topic.