Image via WikipediaEver since graduate school, I've been a firm believer in the "nuclear revolution." The term refers to the belief that the invention of nuclear weapons constituted a fundamental shift in the nature of warfare, and conceivably in international relations itself. As Bernard Brodie put it in The Absolute Weapon (1946): "Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them." (Hmmm. Given that we've fought at least five significant wars since World War II, and a host of minor conflicts, we don't seem to be following Brodie's advice).
The idea of the "nuclear revolution" goes further than that, however. As refined by scholars like Brodie, Thomas Schelling, Glenn Snyder, Robert Jervis, Kenneth Waltz, and Stephen Van Evera, nuclear weapons are said to provide states with the ability to protect their sovereignty and independence not via direct defense but rather through deterrence. Instead of defending one's borders or vital interests with conventional military forces, states could deter enemy attack by threatening to inflict unacceptable damage on an aggressor. As long as they possessed a secure second-strike retaliatory force, in short, they could deter attack by threatening to make an aggressor's losses outweigh its gains. As Winston Churchill famously put it, peace had become "the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation."
Finally, as Jervis argued in several important works, the nuclear revolution dampened (and maybe eliminated) the security dilemma between states. As long as a state possessed a secure second-strike capability (SSC), its security wasn't affected if an possible adversary had a much larger arsenal. In the world of mutual assured destruction, in short, "nuclear superiority" was a meaningless concept. Even if an enemy had a lot more warheads, it couldn't attack a state with a secure SSC without risking devastating retaliation. And it didn't take a genius to figure out that even a minor nuclear exchange would ruin your whole day.
According to the logic of the "nuclear revolution," therefore, states with second-strike capabilities were secure against attack and didn't need to worry very much about their sovereignty or independence. The "security dilemma" was muted, and cooperation between states would be greatly facilitated. (Other theorists took this argument even further, and suggested that the technological change embodied in the nuclear revolution heralded the end of the nation-state and the emergence of a global republic).
I've long accepted the core tenets of this basic argument, and I've taught it to my students for years. But lately I've started wondering about just how far-reaching this "revolution" really was. Although I still accept the core logic, the existence of nuclear weapons doesn't seem to have had the far-reaching political effects that Jervis and others anticipated.
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