The myth of the nuclear revolution: Power politics in the atomic age

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Notes

¹ Daniel Deudney, ‘Nuclear Weapons and the Waning of the Real-State’, Daedalus 124 (Spring 1995), 210.

² See Green, The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

³ As John Mearsheimer recently put it, there was no nuclear war during the Cold War ‘because nobody in his or her right mind, would start a war given the possibility of nuclear Armageddon.’ Interview in The Asahi Shimbun 17 August 2020, at http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13629071.

⁴ For another argument along these lines, see John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Norton, 2007).

⁵ On the connections between the military-industrial complex and US nuclear policy, see Stephen Walt, 'It's Time to Fold America's Nuclear Umbrella,' Foreign Policy online, 23 March 2021.

⁶ See, e.g., Brian Auten, Carter’s Conversion: The Hardening of American Defense Policy, (University of Missouri Press, 2009). Green argues in The Revolution that Failed (pp. 214–20) that the Carter administration move toward a countervailing posture was a consequence of new US interpretations of Soviet nuclear doctrine and civil defence policy, neither of which were new Soviet hard military capabilities.

⁷ Lieber and Press, ‘The End of Mad? The Nuclear Dimension of US Primacy’, International Security 30 (Spring 2006), 7–44. In this piece the authors were more candid about connecting war-winning strategy to US primacy, as the title indicates. Also see Lieber and Press, ‘The New Era of Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence, and Conflict,’ Strategic Studies Quarterly 7 (Spring 2013), 6.

⁸ Myth of the Nuclear Revolution, pp. 127–28, italics added.

⁹ On the contemporary debate in Congress about nuclear policy, see Joe Cirincione, 'How a Hearing on nuclear weapons shows all that's wrong with US foreign policy making,' Responsible Statecraft, 20 May 2021.

¹⁰ On this point, see Charles Glaser and Steve Fetter, ‘Should the United States Reject MAD? Damage Limitation and US Nuclear Strategy Toward China’, International Security 41 (Summer 2016), 49–98.