Three quarters of a century since the first and only use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear landscape has changed substantially in terms of the number of nuclear powers, the size of nuclear arsenals, and the destructiveness of the weapons themselves. Despite this transformation, the basic questions occupying both policymakers and scholars…
Tag: nuclear strategy
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-17 on Pelopidas, Repenser Les Choix Nucléaires
This important and well-researched book appears at a time when concern about nuclear weapons, which lapsed after the end of the Cold War, has resurfaced because of the war in Ukraine and anxieties over Iran. The recent film Oppenheimer gives eloquent expression to these fears, with the main character worrying that the development of the…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-8 on Bell, Nuclear Reactions
In Nuclear Reactions: How Nuclear-Armed States Behave, Mark S. Bell offers an elegant and compelling theory that explains the foreign policy of states that have acquired nuclear weapons. His argument has rightly earned him the acclaim of scholars like Charles Glaser and Scott Sagan[1]. Bell terms his theory as “nuclear opportunism.” He argues countries use…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Article Review 163: Miller on Trachtenberg and Jervis on SALT
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…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Policy Roundtable II-5: The Psychology of Nuclear Brinkmanship
At the tail end of the Cold War, the journal International Security published a brilliant article by historian Marc Trachtenberg demolishing the widely held “idea that the First World War came about because statesmen were overwhelmed by military imperatives and thus ‘lost control’ of the situation.”[1] Quite to the contrary, he wrote, “The most remarkable…
Article Review 127 on “India’s Counterforce Temptations: Strategic Dilemmas, Doctrine, and Capabilities.”
On 14 February 2019 a suicide bomber struck an Indian Central Military Reserve Force (CRPF) convoy in Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir, killing about 40 Indian paramilitary personnel and injuring numerous others. Responsibility for the attack was swiftly claimed by the Pakistan based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed, and confirmed by Indian authorities, immediately dragging the subcontinent—yet…
Roundtable 10-25 onThe Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters
The Bridging the Gap book series at Oxford University Press publishes works that are theoretically grounded and policy relevant. The co-editors—Bruce Jentleson, Steve Weber, and I—marked the formal launch of the series in 2018 with the publication of Georgetown University Professor Matthew Kroenig’s The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy.
Article Review 90 on “Future Warfare in the Western Pacific: Chinese Antiaccess/Area Denial, U.S. AirSea Battle, and Command of the Commons in East Asia” and on “Should the United States Reject MAD? Damage Limitation and U.S. Nuclear Strategy toward China.”
When the Cold War ended in the late 1980s, Washington and Beijing were on good terms–the military balance between the two countries was not politically salient. Much has happened in the ensuing decades. While American attention turned towards battling Iraq in two wars, responding to the threat posed by al-Qaida in Afghanistan and around the…
Roundtable 7-17 on Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict
How do we understand the nuclear strategies of regional powers and how successful are those strategies in deterring conflict? These are obviously important questions for students of world politics, but unfortunately they are also questions that have been largely ignored as scholars focused their attention on the nuclear superpowers of the bipolar era. Of course,…
“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…