Questions
- Is the concept of ‘nuclear strategy’ a contradiction in terms?
- What was the strategic value of nuclear weapons in the Cold War?
- How was nuclear deterrence supposed to work?
- Did nuclear weapons keep the Cold War cold?
Further reading
B. Brodie Strategy in the Missile Age(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959).
—— War and Politics(New York: Macmillan, 1973).
—— (ed.) The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order(New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1946).
G. J. DeGroot The Bomb: A Life(London: Jonathan Cape, 2004).
L. Freedman The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 3rd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003).
—— Deterrence(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
D. Holloway Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956(New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).
R. Jervis The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
F. Kaplan The Wizards of Armageddon(New York: Touchstone, 1983).
R. Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb(New York: Touchstone, 1986).
218 War, peace and international relations
- For a long while after Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the United States did
not have a strategy for its growing nuclear arsenal. - The nuclear revolution occurred in two stages: first, the development of atomic
weapons in the early 1940s; then, the development of thermonuclear, or
hydrogen, weapons in the early 1950s. - Nuclear weapons raised the political threshold for the resort to force in
relations between nuclear-armed states. - The Soviets did not agree with the American concept of stable mutual
deterrence achieved by capabilities for mutual assured destruction (MAD). - The history of US nuclear strategy in the Cold War is the history of the search
for credible nuclear threats and options for use, in order to extend deterrence
over distant allies. - Strategic history cannot reveal whether World War III was avoided because of
nuclear strategy, or despite it.