destructive weapons, major war was still possible, given the anarchic structure of
international politics.
The only solution to the relationship between war and international anarchy
revealed by Waltz’s theorising was the abolition of anarchy through the creation of
a supreme authority – a global Leviathan. Though this ‘may be unassailable in logic’,
he argued it was ‘unattainable in practice’.^11 His argument was that the same
conditions that compel states to compete militarily in the ‘state of nature’ prevent
them from developing the levels of trust that would make a peaceful world state
possible. And even if governments could be persuaded to abolish anarchy and enter
into such a global arrangement (which he strongly doubted), the levels of force that
would be required to hold a world government together could easily lead to civil
war and the collapse of the world state. Consequently, in the ‘absence of tremendous
changes in the factors included in the first and second images’, Waltz argued that
‘war will be perpetually associated with the existence of separate sovereign states’.^12
Waltz’s dismissal of world government as a ‘utopian’ solution to the problem of war
challenged the views of a small but influential group of thinkers, both within and
outside governments, who had argued in the 1940s and 1950s that international
anarchy could not be tolerated in the field of nuclear weaponry. This group had
argued that it was imperative to create a world nuclear authority that would
effectively limit the rights of states to manufacture nuclear weapons.^13 A far-sighted
example of such thinking in the United States was the Acheson–Lilienthal Report
of March 1946 which proposed that states should collectively renounce the right
to possess nuclear weapons, and advocated placing all nuclear materials and tech-
nologies under an International Atomic Development Authority which would be
established as part of the newly founded United Nations. The Acheson–Lilienthal
plan for managing the military implications of the splitting of the atom foundered
on the growing mistrust and suspicion between the United States and the Soviet
Union as Cold War tensions rose. This lack of trust was manifested in the US refusal
to eliminate its existing stocks before the Soviet Union had renounced nuclear
weapons (and of course, had agreed to be subjected to intrusive long-term
verification). As a result, Moscow moved quickly to develop its own bomb. Nuclear
deterrence rather than disarmament became the dominating feature of superpower
relations during the Cold War.
The idea of nuclear deterrence as a means of providing mutual security for
nuclear-armed states represents an alternative to the position, on the one hand, that
anarchy must be replaced by a world nuclear authority, and on the other that nuclear
weapons have had no significant impact on the probability of war between states
(Waltz’s view in Man, the State and War). From the start of the nuclear age, theorists
of what became known as mutually assured destruction (MAD) argued that by
making war mutually destructive for both sides, nuclear weapons had robbed the
superpowers of war as the ultimate instrument for settling conflicts of interest
between them. Even conventional war was argued to be potentially catastrophic if
it involved nuclear-armed powers, since conflict at the lowest level carried the risk
of it escalating into a nuclear exchange. The attraction of nuclear deterrence to some
Beyond Waltz’s nuclear world 251