How should we understand the changes in East Asia over the last quarter century? The region that has undergone the most extraordinarily rapid economic transformation in modern history is the subject of fierce contestation regarding the implications of the shifting material balance between East Asia and the powers that dominated in the Cold-War era. The…
Roundtable 7-2, What Good is Grand Strategy: Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush
One could not ask for a more timely book than Hal Brands’s What Good is Grand Strategy? In the same month that Brands’s book was published a rather important figure in American political life offered his own answer. As reported by David Remnick in January 2014, President Obama dismissed the need for a new grand…
Response to Article Review 28 on “New Delhi’s Long Nuclear Journey: How Secrecy and Institutional Roadblocks Delayed India’s Weaponization”
Jayita Sarkar’s generous though critical review of my article flags several aspects concerning its methodology and substance. These criticisms demand answers and I am happy to provide them.
Article Review 28 on “New Delhi’s Long Nuclear Journey: How Secrecy and Institutional Roadblocks Delayed India’s Weaponization”
Gaurav Kampani investigates a crucial research puzzle in nuclear proliferation literature, namely, the possible underpinnings of India’s slow weaponization process. Addressing the period 1989-1999, he argues that despite acquiring nuclear weapons in 1989-1990, New Delhi lacked the capability to “deliver them reliably or safely until 1994-95 or possibly 1996” (81). According to Kampani, it was…
Roundtable 7-1, No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security
One of the perennial questions of the nuclear age is ‘How Much is Enough?’ In the late 1950’s, Admiral Arleigh Burke and the U.S. Navy argued that the American arsenal could be much smaller than the massive one that had been created over the course of the decade. The Navy position, which came to be…
Roundtable 6-9, “Flawed Logics: Strategic Nuclear Arms Control from Truman to Obama”
Heated debates about the merits of specific arms control agreements were a constant feature of the Cold War. Did the hawks or the doves offer a more compelling and intellectually consistent viewpoint in these debates? In his new book, which should be of great interest to both historians and international relations theorists, James Lebovic argues…
“What We Do, and Why it Matters: A Response to FKS” (Response to ISSF Forum 2)
The following piece is a response to part of the Forum on “What We Talk About When We Talk About Nuclear Weapons.” In his recent Jack Ruina Nuclear Age lecture at MIT, Robert Jervis – arguably our most important scholar of nuclear dynamics – reminded his audience how little we actually know about the influence…
Forum 2 on “What We Talk About When We Talk About Nuclear Weapons.”
Over the past decade, two intellectual renaissances have emerged in the field of nuclear security studies. The first is in political science, where exciting new research has been published about such important subjects as the causes of nuclear weapons proliferation, the linkages between the growth of civilian nuclear power and the spread of nuclear weapons,…
Essay 24- “Did History End?”
Twenty-five years ago, Francis Fukuyama advanced the notion that, with the death of Communism, history had come to an end.[2] This somewhat fanciful, and presumably intentionally provocative, formulation was derived from Hegel, and it has generally been misinterpreted. He did not mean that things would stop happening— an obviously preposterous proposal.
Roundtable 6-8, “The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics”
Easy answers to the numerous problems posed by the proliferation of nuclear weapons will not be found in Paul Bracken’s The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics. In fact, Bracken has very little to say about what are often considered to be the perennial nuclear issues of the post-Cold War world….