At a moment when arms control is deeply troubled and may be dying, two eminent scholars, Marc Trachtenberg and the late Robert Jervis, have taken a fresh look at the beginnings of strategic arms control fifty years after the signing in Moscow of the SALT I agreements in May of 1972. They do so from different vantage points. Trachtenberg, an accomplished historian, draws on voluminous relevant documentary evidence now available to offer a more complete story of the origins and impact of the first strategic arms control negotiations. Jervis, a political scientist who has done hugely influential work on the role of perceptions in international politics, has written here an interpretive essay that examines how understandings of SALT shifted as political and intellectual contexts changed. Though these are two quite different essays, the extent to which their themes and conclusions overlap is striking.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Article Review 163
Marc Trachtenberg, “The United States and Strategic Arms Limitation during the Nixon-Kissinger Period: Building a Stable International System?” Journal of Cold War Studies 24:4 (Fall 2022): 157-197; and Robert Jervis., “The Many Faces of SALT,” Journal of Cold War Studies 24:4 (Fall 2022): 198-214.
Reviewed by Steven E. Miller, Harvard Kennedy School
27 September 2023 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/JAR-163 | Website: rjissf.org
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Thomas Maddux | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
At a moment when arms control is deeply troubled and may be dying, two eminent scholars, Marc Trachtenberg and the late Robert Jervis, have taken a fresh look at the beginnings of strategic arms control fifty years after the signing in Moscow of the SALT I agreements in May of 1972. They do so from different vantage points. Trachtenberg, an accomplished historian, draws on voluminous relevant documentary evidence now available to offer a more complete story of the origins and impact of the first strategic arms control negotiations. Jervis, a political scientist who has done hugely influential work on the role of perceptions in international politics, has written here an interpretive essay that examines how understandings of SALT shifted as political and intellectual contexts changed. Though these are two quite different essays, the extent to which their themes and conclusions overlap is striking.
The starting point for both Jervis and Trachtenberg is the emergence in the late 1950s and early 1960s of a body of work that provided the intellectual foundations of the modern theory of arms control.[1] The rise of arms control was a byproduct of ideas about how to stabilize the nuclear balance between two extremely hostile superpowers. The core insight was that stability depended on minimizing incentives to strike first, especially in crises in which war might seem possible, likely, or even inevitable—crisis stability was a highly desirable goal. Incentives to strike first would be low if the opponent had a reliable ability to retaliate with nuclear weapons. If both sides obtained such a retaliatory capability, a condition of mutual deterrence would exist, in which first strike temptations would be rendered unattractive by the devastating nuclear retaliation that an attack would provoke. This would be a world of mutual assured destruction—MAD, as its critics dubbed it—and was thought to be a stable condition that would temper the dangers of the nuclear age.
Retaliation, of course, depended on possessing nuclear forces that were capable of surviving an opponent’s first strike. Indeed, vulnerable forces would be regarded as destabilizing, as an invitation to attack. Particularly dangerous would be a circumstance in which both sides had forces vulnerable to attack; this situation was, as Trachtenberg underscores, extremely unstable (164-165). As Soviet and American capabilities grew and diversified, however, the prospect of a disarming first strike grew ever more remote. Importantly, this did not wholly eliminate first strike worries. In a crisis there could be powerful incentives to minimize damage to own’s own society by destroying as many of the opponent’s warheads as possible even if a disarming option was not available—this was the so-called damage limitation mission. Nuclear retaliation might be unavoidable, but the damage would be even worse, indeed possibly much worse, if the opponent’s entire arsenal remained intact.[2] Every warhead destroyed was one less warhead that would be available for attack. Thus, vulnerable forces and plans to attack them could introduce first strike incentives even when a disarming first strike is not possible. Moreover, the possessor of vulnerable forces might be motivated to launch them before they were destroyed, introducing a further destabilizing dynamic that could lead to early first use of nuclear weapons—a concern that would arise particularly in the context of crisis. What Thomas Schelling famously dubbed “the reciprocal fear of surprise attack,” with its attendant escalatory pressures, had its origins in the fears and temptations raised by vulnerable forces.[3]
This line of reasoning had important implications for both nuclear doctrine and arms control. In doctrinal terms, the implication was that plans to destroy weapons were dangerously destabilizing—and indeed that the vulnerability of an opponent’s nuclear forces was worryingly threatening because it created incentives for them to use the weapons in stressful circumstances. One of the counterintuitive insights of modern arms control theory was that the security of one side was enhanced by the survivability of the opponent’s forces because the possession of a secure second-strike capability would eliminate use-them-or-lose-them pressures that could trigger an adversary’s attack. To maximize stability, in short, so-called counterforce warfighting doctrines should be avoided. Deterrence would rely on the devastating retaliatory damage that could be done to an opponent’s society. Trachtenberg comments that it is “quite extraordinary” to conclude that the desirable reality would consist of invulnerable weapons and vulnerable populations but that was in fact the essence of a stable mutual deterrence relationship (165).
The aim of arms control, in this logic, was to contribute to or reinforce stability. Arms control, as Jervis explains, “should be designed to bolster deterrence” (200). “Strategic stability,” Trachtenberg echoes, “should become the central goal of arms control” (164). And because a nuclear war would be “mutually disastrous,” both superpowers would have an interest in avoiding it, and this shared interest could make arms control possible. Arms control could be a pillar in a mutual deterrence system that provided security to the two self-interested rivals. It could prevent arms racing that might jeopardize strategic stability by introducing forces or technologies that threatened the survivability of the nuclear arsenal.
This was a coherent, potent, and (for many) appealing intellectual construct. It created a clear rationale and purpose for arms control while also identifying the shared interest in avoiding unwanted war that would make arms control feasible. It became enormously influential within the community of nuclear experts. “The analysis,” Jervis comments, “to its proponents was so clear that it could hardly be rejected by domestic doubters or Soviet leaders….” (200). This view, Trachtenberg writes, “was so widespread that even political leaders who did not share it felt obliged to use that kind of rhetoric” (163).
The case for strategic arms control was widely persuasive but it was not flawless. Both Jervis and Trachtenberg draw attention to a logical contradiction in the thinking about strategic stability. If durable and difficult to escape mutual deterrence could be achieved by acquiring survivable forces that eliminated or dramatically reduced first strike incentives, as many arms control advocates believed, why was arms control necessary? If stability resulted from prudent management of the nuclear force posture, what was the role for arms control? If arms control was actually providing superfluous bolstering of an already stable mutual assured destruction relationship, what was it really contributing? In a striking passage, Jervis draws the inexorable conclusion that emerges from this point: “To most contemporary observers, SALT made the world safer. But when looked at in more detail, it is hard to see why this would be the case” (198). This imperfect logic, though, did little to dampen the popularity of arms control thinking in the SALT I era.
The case for strategic arms control was widely persuasive but it was not universally accepted. There was, from the very beginning, a contending school of thought that rejected most of the premises that undergirded the emerging arms control theory. This more hawkish perspective viewed incentives for war to be fundamentally political, having to do with clashing interests and incompatible foreign policy objectives, rather than deriving from attributes of weapons systems and deployments or the contours of the strategic nuclear balance. They downplayed the dangers of arm racing and indeed questioned whether an arms race was taking place. Where arms control proponents believed that the reality of mutual deterrence made the quest for advantage futile and the notion of superiority largely meaningless, critics judged that advantage could be achieved and could be meaningful and that failure to compete effectively could lead to damaging and politically salient inferiority. Where arms control advocates viewed counterforce warfighting doctrines to be undesirable enemies of mutual deterrence, the doubters believed that such doctrines represented necessary preparations for the war that might happen, and that they were required if the president was to have the option of trying to minimize harm by degrading the adversary’s forces. These early critics of arms control, Trachtenberg concludes, “were hostile to the stability theory and to the doctrine that was based on it” (169). At the outset of the era of strategic arms control, then, the intellectual battle lines were drawn for the coming decades of contestation over its role, value, and desirability. As Trachtenberg details, the arms control vision soon lost its luster and over the long run it was the critics who prevailed much more often than not in shaping or preventing agreements.
In the early 1970s, however, it was the proponents of arms control who were riding high. They embraced a theoretical construct that provides a rationale for arms control and offers clear and unambiguous guidance as to the purpose it was meant to serve. When the SALT I agreements were signed in May 1972, this was seen by supporters and detractors alike as the policy expression of the modern theory of arms control. This was regarded, Jervis observes, as a “triumph of academic ideas” (199). Trachtenberg describes the widely held view that “stability theory played a crucial role in shaping US policy” and quotes Schelling, who suggested that the SALT I agreements represented a “remarkable story of intellectual achievement transformed into policy” (170). The implication of such judgements is that Washington and Moscow accepted mutual deterrence as the basis of their strategic nuclear relationship, that they comprehended and avoided the dangers of counterforce targeting doctrines, that they understood and valued the reassurance provided by survivable forces on the other side, and that arms control was pursued to reinforce strategic stability and to prevent potentially destabilizing developments. If true, academic triumph, indeed.
A core purpose of the Trachtenberg and Jervis essays is to interrogate this claim that arms control was pursued as an instrument for stabilizing the nuclear balance, that theory was converted into policy. Viewing the matter in retrospect and drawing on the voluminous and growing body of now-declassified evidence on the true character and content of US nuclear policy, they arrive at an identical conclusion: the conduct of arms control in the SALT I era was not based on stability theory. Arms control was often publicly justified using the rhetoric of stability. Academics and pundits commonly assumed or asserted that arms control theory provided the foundation for the early strategic arms agreements. But the actual content of both nuclear strategy and arms control policy failed to follow the edicts of the theory. “There is little evidence,” Jervis concludes, “that the negotiations were guided by considerations of stability nor is there much reason to believe that they would have proceeded differently in the absence of the arms control thinking that was so important in the academy and think tanks” (200-201). Trachtenberg similarly finds that the declassified documents reveal a picture that is incompatible with requirements of the theory. “These sources,” he writes, “show that US policy in the period leading up to the 1972 accords was not rooted in the theory of strategic stability.” Arms control theory, Trachtenberg insists, “is not what drove US policy” (171).
In reaching this conclusion, Trachtenberg and Jervis add their voices to the burgeoning chorus of scholars who are using increasingly available documentary evidence to move beyond the early drafts of history and to provide a fuller and more authoritative account of the nuclear age based on the realities revealed in declassified materials. A conventional interpretation of “the nuclear revolution”—to which Jervis, ironically, was a significant contributor—emphasized the stabilizing and pacifying effects of a mutual assured destruction world.[4] In this mutual vulnerability environment, nuclear antagonists were thought to be unusually secure because the risk of war or conquest is low. The prospect of nuclear retaliation will keep the peace because no stake or objective will be worth suffering the consequences of nuclear reprisal. Further, the ruinous effects of nuclear use are so clear and unambiguous that miscalculation is unlikely; states will understand (and fear) the costs of absorbing a retaliatory nuclear attack. This reasoning was pushed to its logical end point by Kenneth Waltz. In his famous monograph, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, Waltz argued that the gradual proliferation of nuclear capabilities to additional states would multiply the peace-causing effects of nuclear weapons. “The presence of nuclear weapons,” he writes, “makes war less likely.”[5] In a separate nuclear analysis, Waltz similarly contended that “Wars that might bring nuclear weapons into play have become extraordinarily hard to start.”[6] The nuclear revolution, in this interpretation, could produce a stable nuclear order in which war between nuclear-armed rivals was unlikely, sovereignty and security were assured by deterrence, incentives to use nuclear weapons were absent, and arms racing could not easily disturb the balance so long as retaliatory capabilities existed on both sides.
A closer look at Waltz’s nuclear reasoning, however, reveals that his conclusions were conditional. It is, Waltz explains, “nuclear weapons and an appropriate doctrine for their use” that will “cause the chances of war to dwindle.”[7] The character of an “appropriate doctrine” is indicated by a somewhat different Waltz formulation of the same point: “The logic of deterrence, if followed, circumscribes the causes of ‘real war’.”[8] There have been glimpses and indications for several decades that suggested that the nuclear superpowers were not meeting these conditions, that they were not following the logic of deterrence.[9] Recent scholarship, based on the much more extensive documentation now available and revelations of capabilities kept hidden during the Cold War, has fundamentally challenged the notion that there was a “nuclear revolution” that caused the nuclear superpowers to pursue stability based on nuclear deterrence and has undermined the claim that mutual deterrence was reliable and perhaps even inescapable. As Brendan Green has written in his trenchant assault on the dominant position occupied by mutual assured destruction in nuclear thinking, “There is one obvious problem with MAD: the Cold War superpowers don’t appear to have believed it.”[10] In their contribution to this literature, Kier Lieber and Daryl Press note that the nuclear superpowers sought to escape nuclear stalemate rather than embrace it as a stabilizing condition.[11] Fred Kaplan provides an account of US nuclear targeting doctrine that describes an enduring and uninterrupted commitment to exactly the kind of counterforce warfighting approaches that are rejected as destabilizing by arms control theory.[12] Green and Long show that the United States worked hard, and with considerable success, to render Soviet strategic forces vulnerable and that Moscow (with reason) lacked confidence in the durability of its deterrent posture.[13] Waltz’s phrase “if followed” seems particularly pregnant with significance in light of the picture painted by the recent literature on the superpower nuclear competition: the “appropriate doctrine” was nowhere in sight.
The Jervis and Trachtenberg examinations of early arms control efforts confirm and augment the themes found in this recent literature on US nuclear policy. Trachtenberg writes, for example, that it “was essentially a myth” that US nuclear policy was based on mutual assured destruction (195). Jervis notes Washington’s determined pursuit of counterforce capabilities, in violation of the tenets of arms control theory, and underscores the rejection of core propositions about stability: “The possible vulnerability of Soviet systems was seen not as a danger that could lead to an unwanted war but as an opportunity to gain unilateral advantage” (208). The political reality is that the practice of arms control had to be compatible with nuclear policy that flouted modern arms control theory, which made it impossible for stability to be the guiding principle or the core purpose of arms control.
Hence the limited impact of the SALT I Interim Agreement on offensive forces. In effect, SALT I codified the existing nuclear relationship between the superpowers. Trachtenberg quotes Milton Leitenberg’s critique of permissive limits in the agreement. SALT I, Leitenberg wrote, “permits both sides to have all its programs and then some….SALT I stopped no program, existing or planned”[14] (188). SALT I did not eliminate, delay, or constrain the most destabilizing technology that was on the verge of entering the scene—multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs). It had no effect on the counterforce operational doctrines adopted by the militaries on both sides. SALT did not limit modernization or impose testing limits that might have slowed destabilizing developments like increased accuracy. As Trachtenberg concludes, “Arms control had not made much of a difference one way or another in terms of what each side ended up doing” (188). Obviously, then, whatever stability existed in the nuclear balance was the result not of arms control but of force posture investments made by the two nuclear rivals. It was large, diverse, hidden, protected, or highly alerted nuclear forces, not arms control measures, that led to a nuclear relationship that was recognized as mutual deterrence—an outcome preferred by neither side and never fully accepted as a durable reality.
If not for stability, then why arms control? What emerges from the Jervis and Trachtenberg essays is an image of arms control as an instrument that can be bent to the wider needs and interests of political leaders. It played a significant role, for example, in American domestic politics. Jervis, in fact, suggests that this was a primary factor motivating the Nixon Administration’s arms control policy: “Domestic political considerations were front and center throughout….” (203). President Richard Nixon was bogged down in Vietnam, challenged by a noisy and powerful protest movement, hampered by a polarized political scene in Washington that ruptured the consensus on defense issues and made it difficult for the administration to find necessary support for its foreign and security policies, and faced with the real possibility that Congress would defeat some of his proposed (and in his view, essential) weapons programs. To enhance his domestic standing, Nixon was hungry for a major foreign policy success. He needed an antidote to his hawkish reputation in order to neutralize the threat posed to his political fortunes by the peace movement. He was searching for an effective lever in his interactions with a recalcitrant Congress. Perhaps above all, Nixon was eager for a triumph that would buttress his 1972 reelection campaign. Arms control negotiations with Moscow that led to an unprecedented agreement would serve these purposes. It is no surprise, then, that Nixon was determined to complete SALT I before the 1972 presidential election campaign was fully launched. Moreover, as Jervis explains, Moscow was well aware of Nixon’s need and eagerness for an agreement while Nixon and Kissinger were acting in the firm conviction that domestic considerations left them playing a weak hand, with the result that “it was the United States that made most of the concessions” (212).
Arms control was also put at the service of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy. In their minds, it was connected to two important foreign policy objectives, one specific and one broader. Specifically, Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger hoped that the perceived Soviet desire for a money-saving arms control agreement could be linked to the American desire to find an escape from the Vietnam war. This linkage strategy rested on the notion that Washington could exploit Moscow’s interest in reaching an agreement to obtain concessions that would facilitate an acceptable exit from Vietnam. Ultimately this strategy failed: hoped-for concessions never materialized and there was no Soviet help in ending the war. As Jervis comments, “All these expectations proved false” (202). But in the design of the Nixon Administration’s arms control policy, this was initially a prominent motive.
More broadly, Nixon and Kissinger were driven by a fear that the United States was not competing effectively with the Soviet Union, that domestic constraints (above all, the anti-Pentagon sentiments induced by the Vietnam war) would prevent the United States from making necessary and appropriate investments in military power in order to prevent Moscow from achieving military superiority, potentially in both conventional and nuclear forces. Feeling that they were operating from this disadvantageous position, they hoped to pursue a détente policy toward the USSR that would moderate its international behavior. A more cooperative relationship with Moscow could ease the competition and result in greater restraint in relations between the two superpowers. SALT became the embodiment of détente, both its main content and most important symbol.[15] This was its enormous value to the foreign policy of Nixon and Kissinger. As Trachtenberg summarizes, “What really mattered was that arms control policy was a lever that could be used in support of more general foreign policy” (182).
Further, in Kissinger’s eyes, détente and arms control were competitive elements in the prosecution of the Cold War. The modern theory of arms control conceived of negotiated cooperation, rooted in a shared interest in avoiding nuclear war, that would allow joint management of the nuclear balance in order to minimize the dangers of the nuclear age by maximizing the stability of the nuclear relationship. The Nixon administration, in contrast, approached arms control as a quest for advantage, as a mechanism for constraining the burgeoning Soviet threat without impeding planned US modernization programs. The Soviet nuclear arsenal was growing rapidly and its modernization program had real momentum. The size of its nuclear arsenal had already significantly surpassed that of the United States. The Nixon administration, which was handicapped by substantial and strenuous opposition to many of its nuclear modernization plans, judged that the United States would be unable to keep pace and hence the military balance would continue to shift against Washington. As Jervis comments, “The military balance in the absence of an agreement looked quite unfavorable” (212). In this context, the essential purpose of arms control was to constrain the adversary, to stop the momentum of the Soviet buildup, to attempt to circumscribe and shape the character of the threat.[16] This the SALT I Interim Agreement did by freezing the number of offensive forces on the two sides, stopping the numerical buildup of Soviet forces (while also locking the US in a position of numerical inferiority, as critics would emphasize). This was achieved without limiting existing US nuclear modernization plans.
SALT I curtailed the enormous Soviet quantitative buildup at a time when the US ability to race was in doubt. What Nixon and Kissinger traded for this gain was the US anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system, which faced enormous opposition in the US Congress and had been saved only be being sold as an arms control bargaining chip. In the Nixon-Kissinger view, they had given up an American system that had insufficient political support in Congress to survive and had brought the runaway Soviet buildup to a halt. It is hard to know how large the Soviet nuclear arsenal might have grown in the absence of SALT I but its accumulation of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons suggests that there was no obvious upper limit—and in this respect SALT I may have been more impactful than suggested by the judgements offered by Jervis and Trachtenberg. Considerations of stability figured in public explanations and justifications for SALT I but not in the genuine motives for or content of the agreements. As Trachtenberg concludes, “When US policymakers considered ideas for limitations of various sorts, what mattered to them was whether a particular step would give advantage to the United States, not whether it would contribute to stability….” (171). Similarly, while Jervis describes how Kissinger’s rationales for arms control and détente shifted across time, one strand of Kissinger’s thought that he came increasingly to emphasize is that his intent was “to compete as hard as possible” (199). Here too Jervis and Trachtenberg join the trend in recent scholarship to interpret Soviet-American arms control as more competitive than collaborative, more driven by one-sided calculations than by a joint quest for stability.[17]
Where Jervis and Trachtenberg part company is in their ultimate judgement about the impact of SALT I. Jervis concedes that SALT I had limited effects on the nuclear policies and postures of the two superpowers, but he nevertheless regards the agreements as “a major achievement” because of their “symbolic importance.” SALT I, Jervis concludes, “underscored the common interest in avoiding war and showed that joint measures to this end were an important part of international politics” (213). Trachtenberg, however, arrives at a harsher verdict. In relation to the creation and maintenance of mutual deterrence, the first strategic arms control agreements were largely irrelevant or inconsequential. But in some respects, they were counterproductive. Bargaining chip arguments led to greater spending on strategic forces. Arms control limits became floors that precluded even sensible reductions. Critics came to believe that arms control codified rather than ended the arms race. Verifiability was privileged over stability when considering force posture modernization; what mattered was that forces could be counted so that future arms control agreements would be possible. Such concerns led one of the fathers of modern arms control theory, Thomas Schelling, to famously ask, “What went wrong with arms control?”[18] Meanwhile, hawkish critics attacked the agreements for conceding numerical advantages to the USSR and ripped into the rationales for arms control, refuting and rejecting the arms race premises on which much advocacy of arms control was based. By the end of the 1970s, Trachtenberg finds, both arms control and the wider détente project were largely “discredited” (186). SALT I, in his view, led not to a collaborative stability but to a process of disillusionment with arms control that resulted in the triumph of hawkish views and, with the arrival of the Reagan administration, a new phase of intense competition with the Soviet Union—results far from the hopes associated with SALT I (197).
As a theory, arms control was conceived as an instrument for stabilizing the nuclear environment by reinforcing mutual deterrence. In these rich essays, Jervis and Trachtenberg show us that what happened in the practice of arms control in the SALT I era is actually quite different. What the historical record shows is that arms control as implemented was not a path to the holy grail of theoretically mandated mutual stability. Rather, it was an instrument in the hands of self-interested and internationally competitive leaders who used it to serve their domestic and international purposes.
Steven E. Miller is Director of the International Security Program in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the scholarly journal, International Security, and co-editor of the International Security Program’s book series, BCSIA Studies in International Security, published by The MIT Press. He obtained his PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Miller has written extensively on nuclear weapons issues, US security policy, and US foreign policy and is currently working on a project of the Committee on International Security Studies at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences focused on nuclear relations among the United States, Russia and China. His publications include the recent co-authored monograph, Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age: Nuclear Weapons in a Changing Global Order (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2019). Miller is also editor or co-editor of more than two dozen books, including The Next Great War? The Roots of World War I and the Risk of US-China Conflict (MIT Press, 2014).
[1] The canonical references include Thomas C. Schelling and Morton Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control, (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961); Donald Brennan, ed., Arms Control, Disarmament, and National Security, (New York: George Braziller, 1961); and Hedley Bull, The Control of the Arms Race, (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1961).
[2] When President John Kennedy was briefed on the nuclear war plan in 1961, for example, he was told by the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff that “Clearly the most important factor affecting damage to the US is that of whether the US acts in retaliation or preemption.” Scott D. Sagan, “SIOP-62: The Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy,” International Security, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Summer 1987): 22-51. The quotation is found on page 51.
[3] Schelling’s original thoughts on this topic can be found in Thomas. C. Schelling, “The Reciprocal Fear of Surprise Attack,” RAND Paper P-1342, May 28, 1958.
[4] Jervis’s important work on nuclear weapons policy include: Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Jervis The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). A concise distillation of his views can be found in Jervis, “The Nuclear Revolution and the Common Defense,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 101, No. 5 (1986), pp. 689-703.
[5] Kenneth Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, Adelphi Paper No. 171, (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981), 28 of web version as available at https://theasrudiancenter.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/kenneth-waltz.pdf.
[6] Waltz, “Nuclear Myths and Political Realities,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 83, No. 4 (September 1990), 744.
[7] Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 9. (Emphasis added.)
[8] Waltz, “Nuclear Myths and Political Realities,” 740. (Emphasis added.)
[9] Starting in the early 1980s, documents became available that revealed that US operational nuclear doctrine emphasized counterforce targeting, not mutual deterrence. See, in particular, David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945-1960,” International Security, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Spring 1983), 3-71.
[10] Brendan Rittenhouse Green, The Revolution that Failed: Nuclear Competition, Arms Control, and the Cold War, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 2.
[11] Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020).
[12] Fred Kaplan, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020).
[13] Brendan Green and Austin Long, “The MAD Who Wasn’t There: Soviet Reactions to the Late Cold War Nuclear Balance,” Security Studies, Vol. 26, No. 4 (2017), 606-641; and Austin Long and Brendan Green, “Stalking the Secure Second Strike: Intelligence, Counterforce, and Nuclear Strategy,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1-2 (2015): 38-73.
[14] Trachtenberg is quoting from Milton Leitenberg, “The SALT II Ceilings and Why They Are So High,” British Journal of International Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (July 1976): 149-163,
[15] This approach had its antecedents in the Johnson Administration. See, for example, Hal Brands, “Progress Unseen: US Arms Control Policy and the Origins of Détente, 1963-1968,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 30, No. 2 (April 2006): 253-285.
[16] On the idea of arms control as threat control, see Michael Nacht, The Age of Vulnerability: Threats to the Nuclear Stalemate, (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 1985, 118-148.
[17] See, in particular, John D. Maurer, Competitive Arms Control: Nixon, Kissinger, and SALT, 1969-1972, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022); Maurer, “The Forgotten Side of Arms Control: Enhancing US Competitive Advantage, Offsetting Adversary Strengths,” War on the Rocks, June 27, 2018; and Maurer, “The Purposes of Arms Control,” Texas National Security Review, Vol. 2, No. 1 (November 2018): 8-27.
[18] Thomas C. Schelling, “What Went Wrong with Arms Control?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Winter 1985): 219-233.