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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.