Long Live the (Nuclear) Revolution

• In Event: Domestic and International Reverberations of Proliferation

Abstract

Has the so-called nuclear revolution – the contention that nuclear war is unwinnable, and therefore crises will be rare, nuclear arms races will only waste resources, and security dilemmas will not define adversarial relations – survived the end of the Cold War? Recently, various scholars have argued that either a) there never was a nuclear revolution, b) the revolution failed, or c) talk of a revolution reflects dated Cold War-era thinking. I argue that the nuclear revolution, when defined in more limited but still meaningful terms, is alive and well. In pointing out the frequency of crises in the nuclear era, the critics have failed to appreciate the paradox at the heart of the revolution: The more intense the crisis, the stronger the deterrent effect, and the more brinksmanship players begin to peer into their own graves. Crises spiral into control. Therefore, pre-nuclear relics like arms races and security dilemmas still occur, but they are strictly capped in severity by the dangers of nuclear escalation. Furthermore, close brushes with death have prompted some nuclear learning and relearning over time, both during and after the Cold War, as the experience of the United States and the Soviet Union as well as India and Pakistan since 1998 demonstrates. Evidence from nuclear crises suggests that the closer nuclear dyads get to the brink, the more they begin to express their concerns in terms of shared fate, a key indicator of the revolution. While security scholars still have crises and security dilemmas to study and explain, the development of nuclear weapons has been and continues to be revolutionary for everyone else, especially the millions of people that high-intensity war has not killed over the past seventy years, and the future warrants guarded optimism as well.

Author

• William L. d'Ambruoso, Harvard Kennedy School