Starting from the Beginning

In this segment Paul Davis suggest that U.S. NC3 modernization “should place increased emphasis on assuring control, avoiding accidents, and avoiding ill-informed or unwise employment of nuclear weapons.” The segment conceptualizes desirable attributes of nuclear command, control, and communications. Much of what is ordinarily front and center in such discussions has been omitted within this report. In particular, Paul does not address the myriad of structural and technical issues associated with mod¬ern¬izing the system's personnel, procedures, facilities, equipment, and communications. Instead, this report asks what core functionality should be demanded, and how those demands should differ from those of the Cold War. Doing so raises provocative issues of which readers, and practitioners, may disagree, but that point back to critical first-order questions that *must* be asked at the outset of reconstituting the aging NC3 architecture.