GREAT POWER RESPONSIBILITY AND NUCLEAR ORDER

Abstract

A Perpetual Menace: Nuclear Weapons and International Order, by William Walker. Routledge, 2012. 247 pages, $42.95.

Keywords:

• Nuclear weapons
• deterrence
• United States
• arms control
• disarmament

Notes

1. The book's title, A Perpetual Menace, is taken from a memorandum sent by Niels Bohr, a founding father of nuclear physics, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in July 1944, one year before the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the memo, Bohr warned that “any temporary advantage [gained from the possession of the atomic bomb], however great, may be outweighed by a perpetual menace to human security.” Walker explains that the book's cover design is based on the medieval allegory of the ship of fools, in which society is depicted as a ship carrying idiots and reprobates unaware of their plight and pilotless on a choppy sea. He points out that the allegory is stretched because the ship he is referring to “carries the innocent and capable along with the deranged, and, far from being allowed to drift aimlessly, is being piloted in acute awareness of mortal danger.”

2. The book examines the most serious challenges to the nuclear order, with the exception of the consequences of the current expansion of nuclear energy (often referred to in the literature as the “nuclear renaissance”). Toward the end of the book, Walker explains that he originally intended to include a discussion on this topic too, but he ran out of time.

3. This conceptualization of the nuclear order will provide useful insights beyond those elucidated in A Perpetual Menace. It could be a useful framework for future research (more on this in note four, below), and could offer interesting perspectives if read in conjunction with important, more narrowly focused works, such as William Potter and Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova, Nuclear Politics and the Non-Aligned Movement: Principles versus Pragmatism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012); Michael Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Maria Rost Rublee, Nonproliferation Norms: Why States Choose Nuclear Restraint (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009); and Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

4. A Perpetual Menace rarely offers strong critiques of the work of other authors. One exception is the discussion at the beginning of chapter six, which is titled: “Into a Second Nuclear Age? Shifting and Expanding Problems of Nuclear Order, 1997–2007.” Here, Walker highlights Michael Krepon's Better Safe than Sorry: The Ironies of Living with the Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) when he cautions against overplaying the concept of a “second nuclear age.” Walker's objection is based, as he explains later in the chapter, on threat inflation, which contains within it “an intrinsic drive to a disproportionate response.”

5. Remarks by President Barack Obama, Prague, Czech Republic, April 5, 2009; United States Mission to the United Nations; “Fact Sheet on the United Nations Security Council Summit on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Nuclear Disarmament: UNSC Resolution 1887,” September 24, 2009, <http://usun.state.gov/briefing/statements/2009/september/129564.htm>; Catherine McArdle Kelleher and Judith Reppy, Getting to Zero: The Path to Nuclear Disarmament (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Tanya Ogilvie-White and David Santoro, Slaying the Nuclear Dragon: Disarmament Dynamics in the Twenty-first Century (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2012); George Perkovich and James Acton, Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, Adelphi Paper 396 (London: International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2008).

6. It is time for a wide-ranging study that addresses the question of an Asian nuclear order from different international perspectives (akin to Perkovich and Acton, Abolishing Nuclear Weapons).