policy-makers remain stubbornly resistant to living with the uncertainties (and hence
vulnerabilities) that are necessary to the building of trust.
There are no risk-free nuclear futures available to us. When decision-makers in
the nuclear powers weigh the risks of taking a ‘leap of trust’^72 that might prove costly
and dangerous, they need to remember that misplaced suspicion brings its own risks
and costs. To give way to the impulse to mistrust, if hostility is fear-based, risks
trapping states in spiralling distrust that could have been avoided, and this increases
the risks that crises might end in the use of nuclear weapons. Despite Waltz’s
sustained arguments to the contrary, there is enough historical evidence from both
the Cold War and South Asia to suggest that these risks will only increase if nuclear
weapons spread further. It is too great a wager with the lives of the millions that
would be killed in a future nuclear war – or even wars – to rely on fear to keep the
arsenals indefinitely at bay. If governments and wider global civil society are serious
about ridding the world of nuclear weapons and ensuring that a non-nuclear world
becomes a more secure one, then radical rethinking and related policy initiatives are
needed to replace security based on nuclear fear with robust security communities
embedded in relations of trust.
Notes
1 This chapter was first presented at a conference on ‘“The King of Thought”: Theory,
the Subject and Waltz’, Aberystwyth University, 15–17 September 2008. I am grateful
to the conference participants for their comments and questions on my paper and wish
to thank Ian Clark, Tim Dunne, David Gill, Andrew Hurrell, Sara Kutchesfahani, Tristan
Price, Nick Ritchie, Len Scott, William Walker, and especially Ken Booth for their
comments on earlier versions of this chapter. I would also like to thank Simon Davies
whose PhD first drew my attention to the importance of the Argentine–Brazilian case of
nuclear trust-building for thinking about the possibilities of nuclear abolition.
2 Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘The spread of nuclear weapons: more may be better’, Adelphi Paper
171 (London: International Institute of Strategic Studies, 1981), p. 30.
3 This definition is taken from Ken Booth and Nicholas J. Wheeler, The Security Dilemma:
Fear, Cooperation and Trust in World Politics(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008),
p. 230.
4 Exploring the contribution that multidisciplinary approaches to trust can make to building
cooperation between nuclear-armed and arming states is the subject of my 3-year
ESRC/AHRC Fellowship on ‘The challenges to trust-building in nuclear worlds’ that
is part of Research Councils UK’s Global Uncertainties Programme: Security for All in
a Changing World’. More details of this project are available at (http://www.aber.
ac.uk/interpol/en/research/DDMI/research_trust_building.html).
5 See Booth and Wheeler, The Security Dilemma, pp. 229–34, 251–61.
6 Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1959), p. 188.
7 Waltz, Man, the State and War, p. 238. See also Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New
Leviathan, Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz(New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 129.
8 Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan, p. 131.
9 Waltz, Man, the State and War, p.236. See also Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan,
pp. 144–45.
10 Campbell Craig argued that Man, the State and War is notable for its lack of attention to
the nuclear question, with ‘The specter of nuclear war [playing] a subordinate role ...
Beyond Waltz’s nuclear world 263