The Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, is a major producer and manager of military intelligence for the United States Department of Defense, employing over 16,500 military and civilian employees ...
The Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, is a major producer and manager of military intelligence for the United States Department of Defense, employing over 16,500 military and civilian employees worldwide. The Defense Intelligence Community is headed by the DIA, through its Director (who chairs the Military Intelligence Board), and coordinates the activities of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force intelligence components. The DIA and DIC provide military intelligence to warfighters, defense policymakers and force planners within the Department of Defense and the United States Intelligence Community, in support of U.S. military planning and operations and weapon systems acquisition. DIA, designated in 1986 as a Defense Department combat support agency, was established in 1961 as a result of a decision by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, under President John F. Kennedy. The Department of Defense created DIA with the publication of Directive 5105.21, "Defense Intelligence Agency" on 1 August, effective 1 October 1961. DIA was preceded by the Counter Intelligence Corps.
Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two opposing sides would effectively result in the destruction of both the attacker and the defender. It is based on the theory of deterrence according to which the deployment of strong weapons is essential to threaten the enemy in order to prevent the use of the very same weapons. The strategy is effectively a form of Nash equilibrium, in which both sides are attempting to avoid their worst possible outcome — nuclear annihilation.
The R-36 (Russian and Ukrainian: Р-36) is a family of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and space launch vehicles designed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The original R-36 was produced under the Soviet industry designation 8K67 and was given the NATO reporting name SS-9 Scarp. The modern version, the R-36M was produced under the GRAU designations 15A14 and 15A18 and was given the NATO reporting name SS-18 Satan; this missile was viewed by certain U.S. analysts as giving the Soviet Union first strike advantage over the U.S., particularly because of its very heavy throw weight and extremely large number of re-entry vehicles, with a maximum of over 10 warheads and up to 40 penetration aids on actually deployed missiles, and theoretically capable of deploying even greater numbers of warheads due to high throw-weight; U.S. missiles of the time, such as the Minuteman III carried, at most, 3 warheads.
Jonathan Edward Schell (born 1943) is a progressive author and professor. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, and TomDispatch. He is the author of The Village of Ben Suc (1967), The Military Half (1968), The Time of Illusion (1976), The Fate of the Earth (1982) (ISBN 0-394-52559-0), The Abolition (1984), History in Sherman Park (1987), The Real War (1988), Observing the Nixon Years (1989), The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now (1998), The Unfinished Twentieth Century (2001), The Unconquerable World (2003), A Hole in the World (2004) and The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (2007), among others. The Fate of the Earth received the Los Angeles Times book prize, among other awards, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Critics Award. He was most recently a Distinguished Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.
In the 1980s, Schell wrote a series of articles in the The New Yorker (subsequently published as The Fate of the Earth), which were instrumental in raising public awareness about the dangers of the nuclear arms race. He has been a persistent advocate for disarmament, and a world free of nuclear weapons.
In 2002 and 2003, Schell was a persistent critic of the invasion of Iraq. He has since commented, "There doesn't seem to be a rush to find the people who were right about Iraq and install them in the mainstream media."
He is the younger brother of Orville Schell.
Schell was honored by the New York Open Center in 2003 for his "masterful analysis of world affairs."
