frameworks of his neorealism.^49 Nuclear weapons are clearly a material variable and
the effects of nuclear weapons are explicitly held to be unrelated to distribution, the
only material variable in the neorealist model. Indeed, Waltz goes out of his way to
debunk fears about the nuclear balance widely held by many other nuclear-age
realists.^50 The recognition that nuclear technology matters so much, and matters so
much in ways largely unrelated to the nuclear balance, is not accompanied by
any reflection about technology more generally, or an analysis of pre-nuclear
technological environments for the presence of smaller-scale versions of the effects
which nuclear weapons produce. Waltz’s nuclear argument, whatever its substantive
merits, is thus essentially ad hoc. It is not so much an advance of system theorizing
about nuclear weapons (let alone technology more generally) as it is a set of astutely
formulated thoughts about nuclear weapons that benefit from Waltz’s reputation as
a system theorist without much connection to his system theory.
Whatever their substantive merits, or relation to neorealism’s variables, deter-
rence theories (most of which are less extreme than Waltz’s) are clearly dominant
in realist thought after the decline of Herz–Morgenthau nuclear one-worldism.
Indeed, most realists do not even consider, let alone support, the nuclear one-world
view, making complete the victory of the deterrence position. But, whatever the
substantive merits of this position, it is theoretically revolutionary, and is a radical
break from the previously main line of theorizing about material context that was
centred around violence interdependence. Before the nuclear revolution, intense
violence interdependence meant acute insecurity and/or consolidation, while after
the nuclear revolution intense violence interdependence makes anarchy peaceful
and muffles and chokes off the dynamics that previously gave interstate politics
its distinctively precarious character. The fact and extent of this break, unacknow-
ledged by realists, is kept conveniently out of sight by collapsing the anarchy-
interdependence problématique into the anarchy problématique. But for theorists
suspicious of radical theoretical innovations, and less optimistic in temper, the
overwhelming victory of deterrence theory is not so compelling. Given the great
pre-nuclear importance of violence interdependence, it would be premature to
dismiss its nuclear-era application in nuclear one-worldism, and its expectations of
either disaster or some sort of authoritative exit from anarchy. Whether deterrence
is at best a temporary holding action (as Morgenthau thought) or an extremely stable
(and stabilizing) force (as Waltz believes), remains to be seen.
Notes
1 Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘Realist thought and neorealist theory’, in The Evolution of Theory in
International Relations,ed. Robert L. Rothstein (Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 21–38.
2 For the range of this debate, see Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and its Critics(New
York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Kenneth A. Oye, ed., Cooperation Under Anarchy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Alexander Wendt, ‘Anarchy is what states
make of it’, International Organization46 (2), 1992; Barry Buzan, Charles Jones, and
Richard Little, The Logic of Anarchy(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993);
Anarchy and violence interdependence 31