Nuclear Realism

What is a realist response to nuclear weapons? This book is animated by the idea that contemporary attempts to confront the challenge of nuclear weapons and other global security problems would benefit from richer historical foundations. Returning to the decade of deep, thermonuclear anxiety inaugurated in the early 1950s, the authors focus on four creative intellectuals – Günther Anders, John H. Herz, Lewis Mumford and Bertrand Russell – whose work they reclaim under the label of ‘nuclear realism’. This book brings out an important, oppositional and resolutely global strand of political thought that combines realist insights about nuclear weapons with radical proposals for social and political transformation as the only escape from a profoundly endangered planet. Nuclear Realism is a highly original and provocative study that will be of great use to advanced undergraduates, graduates and scholars of political theory, International Relations and Cold War history.

Providing a rigorous and objective ethical analysis of nuclear deterrence, this book discusses such issues as the Soviet menace, possible holocaust, and strategic imperatives. At the same time, the authors unmask types of deterrence that they perceive essentially as moral evasions, maintaining that deterrence cannot be bluffing, pure counterforce, the lesser (or greater) evil, or a step towards disarmament. Concluding that deterrence is unjustifiable, this book examines the new questions of conscience that this raises for us all.

It is always appropriate to ask whether an expedient foreign policy is morally justifiable, just as it is always appropriate to ask whether a morally defensible policy is consistent with the national interest. The ongoing dialogue between morality and realpolitik gives much of foreign policy debate its characteristic bite. In this collection of essays, a distinguished group of philosophers, political theorists, and lawyers– including Russell Hardin and Marshall Cohen–explore these contrasting themes. In essays that are at once insightful and accessible, noted political thinkers examine the tension of the conflicting demands of morality and national self-interest in the context of the foundations of international order, the possession and use of nuclear weapons, recourse to war, and the prospects for peace. A final postscript addresses the question of the responsibility of intellectuals in the national foreign policy debate. This book will appeal to scholars and students in any discipline dealing with international affairs as well as to lay readers who wish to explore the implications of taking morality and reason seriously in foreign policy.

Political realism in post-World War II America has not been about power alone, but about reconciling power with moral and ethical considerations. The caricature of realism as an expression of amoral realpolitik has been inadequate and false, for realism in the nuclear age has pivoted as much on moral principles as on power politics. Joel H. Rosenthal’s survey of five noteworthy self-proclaimed political realists explores the realists’ overarching commitment to transforming traditional power politics into a form of “responsible power” commensurate with American values. Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippman, and Dean Acheson—the most important and prolific of the American realists—all fought the excesses of crusading moralism while simultaneously promoting a concept of power politics that retained a moral component at its core. This is the story of how architects of containment, present at the creation of the new bipolar world shaped by the threat of “mutual assured destruction,” became ardent critics of that world. It describes realism as a product of a particular time and place—a set of values, assumptions, processes of moral reasoning, and views about America’s role in the world. Much of the current scholarship on the modern American realists dwells on the alleged inconsistencies of realism as a political theory, and the tortuous mixture of piety and detachment exhibited in the lives of the realists themselves. Rosenthal takes the opposite tack, assembling the ties that bind realism into a coherent world view, rather than deconstructing it into irreconcilable fragments. Rosenthal maintains that the postwar American realists may be best understood as products of the historical and cultural context from which they emerged. Their attempts to articulate a “public philosophy” and integrate values into decision making in international affairs reflected their views on both the way the world “is” and the way the world “ought to be.” This study explains realism as an effort to articulate a prescriptive framework for working toward the ideal while living in the real. In doing so, it reveals the realists’ insistence on evaluating competing claims and on accepting paradox as an inevitable component of moral choice.

This book addresses the under-researched discourse of the evolution of Chinese nuclear posture, and in particular, explains the absence from this evolution of a coherent and well-defined operational doctrine. Using a neoclassical realist framework, the book explains why China, after having launched a crash programme in the mid-1950s to develop a nuclear deterrent, did not debate a clear operational doctrine with respect to targeting and employment until the mid-1980s.