World War that ‘none of the main forces that have gone to make the victory is
nationalist in the older sense’.^25 The emergent global order composed of ‘a small
number of large multi-national units exercising effective control over vast territories’
promises to replicate the patterns of the eclipsed European system, with ‘competition
and conflict’ and a ‘new imperialism’ which would be ‘simply the old nationalism
writ large’ and likely to produce ‘more titanic and devastating wars’.^26 His limited
hopes for peace rest on the decoupling of national sovereignty from military security,
great power self-restraint, and international functional agencies.^27
Herz and Morgenthau on violence interdependence and the
nuclear revolution
The development of nuclear weapons forced realist thinkers to reassess the rela-
tionship between violence interdependence and the security implications of anarchy
on a global rather than merely regional scale. For at least the first decade of the
nuclear era the most prevalent realist view of the implications of nuclear weapons
for interstate politics was essentially an extension of the arguments of Carr and other
industrial globalists on the impact of the mature industrial revolution on the
European state-system: nuclear weapons had produced a situation of worldwide
vulnerability for even the greatest of states, comparable to the perilous state-of-
nature, and the emergence of a world state was therefore necessary for security. This
simple ‘nuclear one worldist’ argument posits the global emergence of levels of
violence interdependence previously experienced on a national and then regional
scale. This argument was advanced in many variations by many realists,^28 as well as
world federalists who differed with one another about secondary issues of timing,
transition, and the character of a security-appropriate world state. The two most
carefully formulated realist versions of the argument about the effects of nuclear
weapons on violence interdependence and thus on the security implications of
anarchy were advanced by John Herz, pioneering theorist of the security dilemma,
and Hans Morgenthau, who played a central role in establishing realism in American
international theory.
Herz argued that the most basic function of states is to provide security through
military control of territory, which requires territorial ‘impermeability’.^29 It is not
enough for a state apparatus to aspire to, claim, or even be recognized as having
statehood. The state apparatus must be capable of making good its claim, and states
are driven to consolidate as the technological bases of military viability shows
increasing scale effects. With the advent of nuclear weapons, states cannot maintain
a protective ‘shell’ and have become ‘permeable’, and therefore another con-
solidation is required.^30 When ‘not even half the globe remains defensible against
the all-out onslaught of the new weapons’, the ‘power of protection, on which
political authority was based in the past, seems to be in jeopardy for any imaginable
entity’. Humans inhabit a ‘planet of limited size’, but ‘the effect of the means of
destruction has become absolute’.^31 Nuclear explosives have produced ‘the most
radical change in the nature of power and the characteristics of power units since
Anarchy and violence interdependence 27