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…
Tag: nuclear strategy
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…
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,…