generally about it. And he also explicitly downplays the importance of technology,
arguing that the ‘perennial forces of politics are more important than new military
technology’.^43 This is then registered in his treatment of nuclear weapons in Theory
of International Politics, where he observes that ‘nuclear weapons do not equalize the
power of nations because they do not change the economic bases of a nation’s
power’, and because they neither caused nor changed the bipolarity of the post-
Second World War system.^44 The material context has been narrowed to the balance
and since nuclear weapons do not or did not shape the fundamentals of the balance
or distribution of capabilities in a bipolar pattern, they do not matter as a first order
event for the international system as understood by his system theory.
The consequence of this dropping of violence interdependence from the main
conceptual apparatus of neorealism is to narrow neorealism to being a systemic rather
than a system theory. This is to acknowledge that so long as international politics is
a second, state-of-war anarchy, then neorealism (particularly as augmented and filled
in by his colleagues and students) offers powerful explanatory insight.^45 Its limitations
arise when levels of violence interdependence shift and push actors from a second
to a first anarchy.^46 Such shifts are vastly less frequent than the routine interactions
that have marked the second anarchy of the early modern European and the
industrial global state-systems. Waltz looks at the last five hundred years of world
politics, and sees only one significant change, from multipolarity to bipolarity, not
registering as a system change the change that occurred when the system went from
being very loosely global, to one in which the main great power actors were
continental sized (or viewed becoming so as a life or death matter) and as interactive
at global scales as the nation-states had been in Europe.^47
The narrowing of the anarchy-interdependence problématique to the anarchy
problematic also occurs in Waltz’s nuclear arguments, his attempt to grapple with a
situation in which the level of violence interdependence in the system shifted
suddenly and significantly.
In essays after Theory, Waltz sketched a very different view of nuclear weapons.
In his famous ‘More may be better’ essay Waltz adopts an extreme version of the
argument, largely dominant among realist theorists, about the central role of
deterrence in a state-system with nuclear weapons. Here he argues that nuclear
weapons seem to negate or severely circumscribe the perennial political force of
anarchy. For Waltz anarchy with nuclear weapons is radically unlike anarchy
without nuclear weapons. Added to anarchy, nuclear weapons produce a peace far
more robust than was previously achieved by the balance and balancing. The
prospect of war, which previously shadowed the pursuit of security by state actors
in anarchy, seems, in Waltz’s assessment of the nuclear era state-system, to be far
closer to the perpetual peace visions of Kant and others that Realists had for so long
dismissed as pipe dreams than to the uncertain and precarious situation of interstate
anarchy.^48
Waltz thus provides an image in which technology has vastly influential, even
transformative, influences on the pursuit of security in anarchy. But whatever their
substantive merit, Waltz’s nuclear claims sit very awkwardly in the conceptual
30 Anarchy and violence interdependence