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Preface

Although writing a book about the meaning of nuclear weapons has been in the back of my mind for years, I always hesitated about starting the project. A fair part of that reticence reflected the fact that much of what follows here could not have been written even a decade ago: not only did I think differently then about nuclear weapons during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, but there was much that we simply did not yet know (and still do not know) about the making of nuclear policies in the United States and the former Soviet Union. Nonetheless, I knew that the issues in this book have been coloring many of the other problems I’ve studied over the years. Whether writing about Soviet civil-military politics as I did at the start of my career, or considering the advent of a new international age of preventive war as I did in my most recent work, the use of nuclear weapons and the possibility of nuclear war were constant companions to the questions I was investigating.

Paradoxically, I nonetheless avoided writing specifically about nuclear weapons for quite some time, because the implications of their use are so complicated and immense that they tend to swamp all other conclusions about anything else. The new reality, for example, that the United States and other nations now think much more permissively about preventive war—that is, attacking other nations far in advance of an actual threat—logically raises the question of whether anyone would use nuclear weapons in such preventive attacks. But to focus on that possibility in the larger discussion of preventive war risks placing the momentous but slight possibility of nuclear use at the center of what should be a larger discussion about the use of any kind of force. Once we start to think about nuclear bombs going off, it gets a little harder to think about anything else.

I also shied away from a project on nuclear weapons because I did not want my work to be overly influenced by my own experiences coming of age in the shadow of global nuclear war. (Whether I’ve succeeded will be up to the reader, of course.) As I’ve written elsewhere, I grew up in an Air Force town that was home to a major Strategic Air Command nuclear bomber base. Like many communities that hosted the American nuclear deterrent, we didn’t like to think much about the weapons that were sitting up the road at the base, but we knew they were there and what that meant for us in the event of a war. The Cold War did not end until I was thirty, and until then I had never known anything but a world that was, at least to me, defined by the standoff with the USSR and kept at peace only by the protective shield of American nuclear power. While I was somewhat more comfortable writing about nuclear history, as I did in the late 1990s, I am not certain that I could have written about the future of nuclear weapons while I was still so close to their past.

As the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall approached, however, I finally decided to study and write about nuclear weapons directly rather than by implication. I presumed that I knew my way around these issues, and that my thinking was mostly settled. At the least, I felt reasonably well equipped to tackle modern nuclear strategy: I had spent years studying the Soviet Union and Russia, worked in both the private and public sector on both nuclear and conventional military issues, and taught strategy and national security affairs in a military institution.

As I began writing the book, I quickly realized I was mistaken. First, I found that any approach to the study of nuclear issues required relearning the history of the Cold War. Although I had experienced it and had to some extent participated in it, like many other scholars of international relations I felt swamped by the revelations and new knowledge that became available only after the Cold War’s end. These new histories showed how deeply the Soviets and the Americans were plagued by irresolvable questions about the role of nuclear arms, and more important, how both were ruled by an almost paralyzing fear of nuclear conflict. It is one thing to guess at these findings, which might have been predictable or intuitive on a human level, but it is another to see them in the actual documents and memoirs from the Cold War era.

Second, and more unsettling, I found that many of my own previous beliefs about the utility of nuclear force fell apart on closer examination. I realized that a great deal of what I thought I knew about nuclear deterrence actually reflected what I assumed about nuclear deterrence. Much of my thinking about nuclear arms rested on my familiarity with the Soviet Union and my subjective judgment about what would deter the Soviet leadership from resorting to war. My beliefs about deterrence—like all beliefs about deterrence—were based on my best guess about the nature of the enemy. This is not to say that I believed in any actual need for the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons stockpiled during the Cold War, but rather only that I accepted that the Soviet Union, for whatever mad reasons, could only be deterred from taking great risks by the presence of a large nuclear arsenal massed against it. The goal was to make the Kremlin afraid to court war, and if it took 20,000 warheads to do it, such was the price of keeping the peace during the Cold War.

I cannot know now whether I was right or wrong to believe this. I think I was correct, in a general way, to regard the Soviet regime in its day as mildly psychotic: delusional, paranoid, prone in unpredictable measure both to fits of great fear and sweeping overconfidence, and obsessed with totems of power, including the near-worship of nuclear weapons, in a way that made no sense to a normal person. I also had to accept as well the unfortunate reality that the American national security bureaucracy had become inured to dealing with ghastly amounts of nuclear firepower. It is clearer to me now that the grinding business of maintaining a nuclear deterrent took on a life of its own far earlier than I and many others wanted to believe. Within a decade of their discovery, nuclear weapons were an industry and an intellectual endeavor that escaped control in both East and West. We live with that legacy today, and it is a far more durable one than I expected to find.

Nuclear weapons are a routine part of the lives of the great powers. Concepts and weapons created during a different time, and which could only be rationalized by the supreme needs of national survival, continue to define the international security environment. As I write this, the last U.S. troops have returned from a war ostensibly launched to prevent Iraq from acquiring nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Even larger conflicts potentially loom with North Korea and Iran over the same issue. The United States and its allies, so far, are still investing their hopes in nuclear deterrence. What was once a desperate expedient forced upon the West by the accidental and brief existence of the Soviet Union is now a virtually unquestionable cornerstone of American national security policy.

I am neither an antinuclear activist nor a sanguine theorist of nuclear employment. I do not think a goal of zero nuclear weapons can be reached in my lifetime, but neither do I believe that nuclear weapons can solve any of the new problems America faces in the twenty-first century. If I am certain of anything, it is only that I know that we can do better in our thinking about nuclear weapons than we have since 1945, and so rather than provide only criticism, this book is my attempt to contribute to a more constructive rethinking of nuclear weapons and of their role in both American and international security.

Books can take a long time to write, especially when events (and the author’s mind) keep changing, and they are never written alone. This study is no exception, and it would have been impossible to complete without the help of many people and institutions.

I am indebted to the International Security Program and the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. During my three years as a Fellow at the Kennedy School, I was fortunate to receive the advice and input of a diverse group of colleagues with expertise in nuclear issues ranging from proliferation policy to nuclear engineering. My time at the Belfer Center was a good reminder that even in midcareer, scholars can—and should—learn something new. I would especially like to thank Managing the Atom’s executive director, Martin Malin, for his friendship and advice, and the International Security Program (ISP) board and its director, Steven Miller, for the willingness to host me for an extended stay. I also wish to thank Susan Lynch at ISP for all of her assistance during my time there.

An early draft of the concepts in this study, and particularly on the problems of nuclear war with small states, was presented in Zurich at a conference on the history of proliferation held by the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. I later presented parts of the research to colleagues at the Czech Institute of International Relations in Prague and the Polish Institute of International Affairs in Warsaw. I thank all of these organizations for their invitations to discuss my work with them and for their comments.

Much of the discussion in the book regarding ethical and moral problems in nuclear strategy is the result of issues I have studied as a senior associate of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City. My association with the council encouraged me to include those issues in my curriculum at Harvard Extension and in the classrooms of the Naval War College, and I wish to thank the council and its president, Joel Rosenthal, for my affiliation with the council during the writing of this study.

I was fortunate to have a great deal of feedback on earlier drafts of this book and the concepts in it from many of my colleagues at the U.S. Naval War College, including David Burbach, Col. Steve Charbonneau USAF, Tom Fedyszyn, Steve Fought, Nick Gvosdev, Joan Johnson-Freese, Mackubin Owens, John Schindler, Andrew Stigler, and Dana Struckman. I want to extend special thanks to my friend and colleague, Lt. Col. Mike Waters USAF, who not only read significant portions of the manuscript, but had to put up with the civilian guy across the office constantly peppering him with questions. Finally, I would also like to thank the provost, Ambassador Mary Ann Peters, for her strong support of faculty research at the Naval War College.

I owe thanks as well to many friends and colleagues at other institutions for their help and comments, including Matthew Bunn, William Burr, Elbridge Colby, Jeffrey Lewis, Kier Lieber, Jeffrey Mccausland, Andrew Newman, T. V. Paul, Andrew Ross, Gary Schaub, Steve Sternheimer, and James Wilson. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the University of Pennsylvania Press. As always, the conclusions of this study are those of the author alone. They do not represent the views of any of the people who provided comments or the institutions who provided assistance with the project, nor of the United States Government or of any other organizations with which I have been affiliated.

For many years, I have had the privilege of teaching at the Harvard Extension and Summer Schools. I am grateful to my students in my classes there on nuclear weapons and international security who participated in lively debates with me about many of the ideas in the book during its writing. Both Harvard Extension and the Naval War College have student research programs that also made it possible for me to work with many talented research assistants and graduate students, and I wish to thank Tim Clarke, Dan Feldman, Ahmed Hassan, Amy Hull, Michael Miner, David Nicholson, Joshua Sheehan, and Chris Thomas for their help.

Bill Finan, my editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, was a source of constant support and wise advice for this book from conception to publication. Bill and I worked on my previous book as well, and once again I have not only benefited from his steady editorial hand (which I know I’ve put to the test over the years) but also from his friendship, optimism, and encouragement.

This book is dedicated to my father, Nick James Nichols, and to my daughter, Hope Virginia Nichols. My father was one of America’s dwindling number of World War II veterans, and although he passed away as the book was nearing completion, we had many conversations about its subject. He was stationed in California as a private in the U.S. Army in early 1945, and while the first nuclear bomb may well have saved his life, he never believed that anyone would ever be crazy or evil enough to fight an all-out nuclear war. He had a confidence and peace of mind about this that I envied during the Cold War, but his wisdom seems to have been borne out, at least where the Americans and the Russians are concerned. My daughter, born in Moscow long after the Cold War’s end, is too young to know what all the fuss was about. I hope that when she reads some of these pages in later years, she will wonder exactly the same thing.