governments and their supporters has been the promise that an individual state could
provide for its own security without limitations on its sovereignty, or even more
far-reaching modifications of world political organisation, as envisaged by nuclear
disarmers or advocates of a world nuclear authority.^14 The MAD notion that nuclear
weapons had revolutionised interstate behaviour fundamentally challenged Waltz’s
third-image argument in Man, the State and War. However, his views in the 1950s
on the essential irrelevance of nuclear weapons to the ultimate question of war
underwent a shift by the 1980s, such that he became convinced that nuclear weapons
had transformed the likelihood of war. He wrote: ‘Although the possibility of war
remains, nuclear weapons have drastically reduced the probability of its being fought by the
states that have them.’^15 What is more, Waltz pressed the case of deterrence theory in
a direction that even its most vigorous supporters had been wary of advancing,
namely, the thesis that the benefits of nuclear deterrence are such that they should
be spread beyond the existing nuclear states: the proliferation of nuclear weapons
might be an international good.
Waltz’s policy prescription confronted head-on the conventional wisdom
underpinning the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which had been signed
in 1968. The Treaty had recognised de jure the five nuclear-weapon states (NWS)
that had manufactured and tested nuclear weapons before 1 January 1967 (the
definition of a NWS under Article IX of the NPT). However, the Preamble to the
Treaty stated that ‘the proliferation of nuclear weapons would seriously enhance the
danger of nuclear war’, and in Article VI, the NWS committed themselves to
‘pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the
nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on
general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control’.
Waltz’s ‘proliferation optimism’ not only challenged the non-proliferation norm in
‘international nuclear society’;^16 it also had profound implications for his ‘third-
image’ theory that international anarchy is the permissive cause of war.
More may be better
Waltz based his controversial conclusion that the ‘measured spread of nuclear
weapons is more to be welcomed than feared’^17 on his assessment of the effects that
nuclear weapons had in promoting cautious superpower behaviour during the Cold
War. Compared with his earlier discussion in Man, the State and War, he was now
so impressed with the historically novel war-preventing character of nuclear
weapons that he argued that all that was necessary for successful deterrence was a
secure second-strike capability. He wrote: ‘In a conventional world, one is uncertain
about winning or losing. In a nuclear world, one is uncertain about surviving or
being annihilated.’^18
Given this belief in deterrence, Waltz dismissed the concern that the spread of
nuclear weapons to rival states in war-prone regions would intensify fear and
suspicion, increasing the risk of one side launching a pre-emptive nuclear attack. He
argued that nuclear pre-emption is only viable,
252 Beyond Waltz’s nuclear world