Projects and Media

Here you will find a collection of projects, articles, and videos mentioning NWS or using materials from NWS in some form.

Projects

Simulating Nuclear War | Princeton Science & Global Security

This project is aimed at developing a new simulation to explore nuclear war between the United States and Russia and the role of the current fleet of 400 on-alert silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in U.S. nuclear strategy and plans. This project seeks to highlight the potentially catastrophic consequences of US and Russian nuclear arsenals and war plans and choices about maintaining and modernizing nuclear delivery systems and challenge the utility of ICBMs by simulating nuclear exchanges involving a U.S. arsenal with and without ICBMs. The project is led by Sharon Weiner, an Associate Professor of International Relations at the School of International Service. Attacks on military targets are modeled using software developed by Moritz Kütt (Senior Researcher at the Institute for Peace and Security Research (IFSH) in Hamburg) and include characterization of the accuracy of the weapon and target hardness. NWS is used to estimate the fatalities for each scenario and to visualize the results.

OPEN-RISOP

OPEN-RISOP is an attempt to build an open-sourced version of the Red Integrated Strategic Operational Plan (RISOP) using an open-sourced targeting database with weapon allocation modules and consequence of execution tools. The target database is compiled by David Teter, a former advisor to US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM/J5), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA/JWS-4), and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) on strategic plans (SIOP/OPLANs 8044/8010), kinetic and non-kinetic weapon effects, vulnerability analysis, and targeting. NWS is used to estimate the fatalities for each scenario and to visualize the results. Three attack scenarios are considered in the database: counterforce-only, countervalue-only, and a mixed counterforce + countervalue attack. Using the HYSPLIT particle transport simulation we analyze the variability of fatalities depending on the time of the attack and the corresponding weather patterns.