The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keir A. Lieber ◽  
Daryl G. Press
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Technological Changes ◽  
Arms Races ◽  
The Core ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
The Cold War

Leading analysts have predicted for decades that nuclear weapons would help pacify international politics. The core notion is that countries protected by these fearsome weapons can stop competing so intensely with their adversaries: they can end their arms races, scale back their alliances, and stop jockeying for strategic territory. But rarely have theory and practice been so opposed. Why do international relations in the nuclear age remain so competitive? Indeed, why are today's major geopolitical rivalries intensifying? This book tackles the central puzzle of the nuclear age: the persistence of intense geopolitical competition in the shadow of nuclear weapons. The book explains why the Cold War superpowers raced so feverishly against each other; why the creation of “mutual assured destruction” does not ensure peace; and why the rapid technological changes of the 21st century will weaken deterrence in critical hotspots around the world. By explaining how the nuclear revolution falls short, the book discovers answers to the most pressing questions about deterrence in the coming decades: how much capability is required for a reliable nuclear deterrent, how conventional conflicts may become nuclear wars, and how great care is required now to prevent new technology from ushering in an age of nuclear instability.

scholarly journals Nuclear weapons, extinction, and the Anthropocene: Reappraising Jonathan Schell

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Rens van Munster ◽  
Casper Sylvest
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Nuclear Environment ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Do So

Abstract In the Anthropocene, International Relations must confront the possibility of anthropogenic extinction. Recent, insightful attempts to advance new vocabularies of planet politics tend to demote the profound historical and intellectual links between our current predicament and the nuclear age. In contrast, we argue that it is vital to revisit the nuclear-environment nexus of the Cold War to trace genealogies of today's intricate constellation of security problems. We do so by reappraising the work of Jonathan Schell (1943–2014), author of The Fate of the Earth (1982), who came to regard extinction as a defining feature of the nuclear age. We show how a deep engagement with nuclear weapons led Schell to an understanding of the Earth as a complex, delicate ecology and fed into a sophisticated, Arendtian theory of extinction. Despite its limitations and tensions, we argue that Schell's work remains deeply relevant for rethinking human–Earth relations and confronting the Anthropocene.

National Internationalists: British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons, the Politics of Transnational Communications and the Social History of the Cold War, 1957–1964

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
HOLGER NEHRING
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social History ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This article examines the politics of communication between British and West German protesters against nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The interpretation suggested here historicises the assumptions of ‘transnational history’ and shows the nationalist and internationalist dimensions of the protest movements' histories to be inextricably connected. Both movements related their own aims to global and international problems. Yet they continued to observe the world from their individual perspectives: national, regional and local forms thus remained important. By illuminating the interaction between political traditions, social developments and international relations in shaping important political movements within two European societies, this article can provide one element of a new connective social history of the cold war.

Deconstructing the bomb: recent perspectives on nuclear history

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. HUGHES
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Manhattan Project ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Nuclear History ◽  
The Cold War

John Canaday,The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Pp. xviii+310. ISBN 0-299-16854-9. £19.50.Septimus H. Paul,Nuclear Rivals: Anglo-American Atomic Relations 1941–1952. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Pp. ix+266. ISBN 0-8142-0852-5. £31.95.Peter Bacon Hales,Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Pp. 448. ISBN 0-252-02296-3. £22.00.A decade after the end of the Cold War, the culture and technology of nuclear weapons had lost much of the overt sense of dread they once inspired. The decline in international tension following the end of the communist regimes of the Soviet bloc produced a massive shift in the ideology of the nuclear in the 1990s. The de-targeting and dismantling of large numbers of nuclear weapons and the demise of the threat of nuclear annihilation created new conditions both for international security and for the writing of nuclear history. With the declassification and release of large quantities of official documentation from the former adversaries, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1995, a burst of histories of various aspects of the nuclear age have appeared over the last ten years, exploring not just the technopolitics, strategy and operational logistics of the Cold War and the arms race, but the cultural history of the nuclear age, its imagery, its architecture, its oppositional politics and its effects on the landscape, national and regional economies and cultures and indeed everyday life. At a time of global economic and political uncertainty and the emergent threat of capricious international terrorism and new nuclear proliferation, the apparent certainties of the Cold War now even evoke a certain nostalgia, and its artefacts and structures are being recast as ‘heritage’.

The End of the Cold War as a Hard Case for Ideas

2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
William C. Wohlforth
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Hard Case ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Cold War

The articles in this special issue of the journal succeeded in meeting the core objective set out in the introduction: to refine, deepen, and extend previous studies of the role of ideas in the end of the Cold War. In particular, they confront more forthrightly than past studies a major challenge of studying ideas in this case; namely, that ideas, material incentives, and policy all covaried. Two other important problems for those seeking to establish an independent role for ideas remain to be addressed in future studies. Facing those problems as squarely as the contributors to this issue have faced the covariation problem will yield major benefits for the study of ideas in this case and in international relations more generally.

12. The Second Nuclear Age: Nuclear Weapons in the Twenty-First Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 202-219
Author(s):  
C. Dale Walton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Strategic Culture ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines the role played by nuclear weapons in international politics during and after the cold war, making a distinction between the First Nuclear Age and the ongoing Second Nuclear Age. After providing a background on the First Nuclear Age, the chapter considers the various risks present in the Second Nuclear Age, focusing on issues related to nuclear deterrence, nuclear proliferation networks, strategic culture, and ballistic missile defences. It then discusses the assumption that arms control and disarmament treaties are the best means to further counterproliferation efforts. It also assesses the future of nuclear weapons and whether the world is facing a Third Nuclear Age before concluding with an analysis of the relevance of deterrence in the face of changing political and technological circumstances.

The Good State: in praise of ‘classical’ internationalism

2005 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER LAWLER
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Politics ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Good State ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War

The end of the Cold War has seen Western internationalism migrate from the margins to the centre of International Relations theory and practice. As a consequence the modest ambitions of what we might now call ‘classical internationalism’ have come under challenge from more thoroughly cosmopolitan varieties from both the right and left of the mainstream Western political spectrum whose commonalities, moreover, are arguably becoming as prominent as their differences. This article attempts to recover the classical internationalist project and, more specifically, the understanding of statehood that underpins it. Some observations on the distinctions and tensions between varieties of contemporary internationalist and cosmopolitan thinking about international politics are followed by a critique of a pervasive scholarly disinterest in the varieties of Western internationalist states. These two exercises form the backdrop to advocacy of the idea of ‘the Good State’ as a response to dominant forms of contemporary Western cosmopolitanism and their critics.

scholarly journals Paradox of humanitarian intervention: A critical analysis of theory and practice

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 222
Author(s):  
Tadelech Bubamo Welde ◽  
Baiq L. S. W. Wardhani
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Political Ambition ◽  
Rigorous Analysis ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Political Weapon ◽  
The Cold War

Since the end of the Cold War, thoughtlessness act in conducting ‘humanitarian interventions’ has posed analytical challenges for international relations academicians. Traditional security advocators have tried to distinguished implications of ‘humanitarianism’ based on their interest and how it helps state in regaining the outcome. This research identified motivation of state in conducting humanitarian intervention. There are growing studies, as expressed by the constructivist, that humanitarianism is states’ political weapon that shifted the involvement patterns of policymakers and actors in humanitarian interventions. On the other hand, primary criticism from realism stressed economic and political ambition behind humanitarian interventions and makes it impossible to be moral, ethical, and cosmopolitan. The objective of this study is to examine the practices, motives, and challenges of humanitarian interventions. Data gathered from published books and journals selected through rigorous analysis. The research finds that the failure of humanitarian interventions indicates the following: First, humanitarian interventions requires expensive cost in people’s life and other resources. Moreover, there is a moral obligation to save the victims.  Second, actors are engaged to operate the mission and has limited right to demonstrate their self-interest to protect the victims. Third is the issue of sovereignty and the subjected state’s willingness to integrate. To overcome the problem, government should promote global governance transformation and the cosmopolitanism nature between actors.

scholarly journals “All the time, somebody listens in”: mirror images of social paranoia in twentieth-century American and Soviet literature

2012 ◽  
pp. 10-14
Author(s):  
Miranda Corcoran
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
Soviet Literature ◽  
State Surveillance ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Selection Of

Emphasising the manner in which literary texts often serve to express the collective hopes and fears of their respective cultures or communities, my research explores the representation of social paranoia in a selection of Cold War American and Soviet Russian novels. Although the antagonism between these two opposing superpowers, and their struggle for ideological supremacy, shaped the course of twentieth- century international relations, my research proposes that an examination of the literary and cultural output of these two apparently irreconcilable socio-political systems reveals a parallel preoccupation with a number of typically paranoid concerns. These shared anxieties include the unsettling reality of state surveillance and similar methods of social control, the ever-present threat of enemy infiltration, and the politicisation of science which resulted in the terror of the Nuclear Age. Indeed, much of the fiction produced in Russia from the Stalinist era onwards and in the U.S. during the Cold War ...

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