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Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination
... French nuclear weapons testing on the continent, which launched extensive protests, illustrate the ways in which imperial, neo-colonial mentalities continued to overshadow the continent, even after liberation. Fears associated with radiation and nuclear disasters are an aspect of this embodied experience common across the nuclear world (Gusterson, 1999). African countries' historic embrace of nuclear power, as a modernizing force for independent states, illustrates the ambivalence toward nuclear power-at once, both desired and dreaded. ...
... Nkrumah's fears of the embodied consequences of exposure to the fallout of nuclear weapons testing, highlight the anxieties associated with African experiences with nuclear materials (Gusterson, 1999). Later in the same speech, Nkrumah ties the French nuclear imperialism to colonial efforts to balkanize Africa by creating internal divisions in order to highlight the fallacy of arbitrary borders in the face of the spread of radioactive fallout through the atmosphere. ...
... However, not far beneath any discussion of uranium, nuclear power, or nuclear weapons is a discourse of largely Western, northern domination over the southern, formerly Third, World. This narrative, which concealed the origins of African uranium, defends the status quo of limiting nuclear technological knowledge in an "othering" or "Orientalization" of non-nuclear states (Gusterson, 1999). Despite superficial agreement that nuclear power technology can be the key to modern development, as first espoused in the Atoms for Peace program, this narrative in practice limits the spread of nuclear power generation to developing countries. ...
This review examines the history of uranium mining in sub-Saharan Africa to contextualize recent extraction developments on the continent. From the secretive days of uranium mining in the first half of the twentieth century to today's ambitions of African nations to domestically mine uranium and generate nuclear power, Africa remains largely invisible from the global nuclear record in spite of its historical significance. The Cold War dynamics that bound the nuclear world are increasingly untenable as African states turn to nuclear power to meet growing energy deficits. This article reveals how African states challenge narratives serving to obscure the African origins of uranium. Connecting the history of uranium mining with non-proliferation agreements and aspirations for nuclear power, this review examines the current place of Africa in the nuclear world, and looks to the future.
... Adler (1992) argues that the discursive formations of realist theory about nuclear weapons actually had a constitutive effect on the nuclear order itself, shaping policy makers' belief in the possibility of nuclear deterrence. Following the Cold War, the dominant nuclear discourse has adapted from a focus on the big Other (the opposing Superpower), to a fixation on preventing proliferation to 'non-Western' countries, while preserving nuclear-armed state arsenals (Gusterson, 1999;Cooper, 2006). ...
... Indeed, some NAM states have sought to redress the nuclear imbalance by seeking their own arsenals. (Singh, 1998;Gusterson, 1999;Biswas, 2001Biswas, , 2014. ...
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has aimed to reenergize global civil society activism on nuclear weapons through a discursive strategy, borrowing self-consciously from critical and post-positivist international relations (IR) theories. ICAN aims to generate a new disarmament discourse that establishes nuclear weapons as inherently inhumane. Alongside the state-led Humanitarian Initiative, ICAN campaigners are helping to reshape the conversation at certain international meetings on nuclear weapons. They have helped to contest the dominance of national security narratives and force even the nuclear-armed states to address the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons. In supporting a reframing of the conversation, they have opened nuclear disarmament policy making to new voices. However, as with the transmission of many ideas from one arena to another – in this case from academia to global policy making forums – there is a translation process as ICAN campaigners selectively adopt from post-positivist IR to meet their political goals. It is possible that this translation of critical theorizing into the setting of multilateral forums has necessitated reducing the potency of the disruptive critique of the original ideas.
... Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jogss/article/8/1/ogac037/6986343 by guest on 13 January 2023 1982-1994Algeria 1999-2000Angola 1984-1993Argentina 1971-1993Australia 1945-1973Brazil 1988-1993Burma 1988-2000Canada 1945-1946Chad 1988-1993Chile 1988-1993China 1945-2000Czechoslovakia 1945Egypt 1945-19621963-2000Ethiopia 1980-1993France 1945-1993German Democratic Republic 1980-19821983Germany 1945Greece 1945Hungary 1945India 1947-2000Iran 19831984-2000Iraq 1971-19791980-2000Israel 1952-19551956-2000Japan 1945Kazakhstan 1991-2000Laos 1988-1993Libya 1976-19801981-2000Mozambique 1988-1993North Korea 1965-2000Pakistan 1982-1986-2000Peru 1988-1993Philippines 1988-1993Poland 1945Rhodesia 19751976-1980Saudi Arabia 19881990-1993Somalia 1988-2000South Africa 1945-1993South Korea 1967-2000Soviet Union/Russia 1945-2000Spain 1945Sudan 1990-2000Sweden 1945-1973Syria 1971-19721973-2000Taiwan 1970-19821983-2000Thailand 1988-1993United Kingdom 1938-1957United States 1945-2000Vietnam 19751990-2000Yugoslavia 1958-19681969-2000 1999-2000Bulgaria 1988-1993Canada China 1950-19611962-2000Cuba 1988-1993Egypt 1945-19711972-2000France 1945-1973Germany 1945Iran 1981-2000Iraq 1974-1986,1992-2000-1991Israel Japan 1945Laos 1988-1993Libya 1988-2000North Korea 1965-2000Rhodesia/Zimbabwe 19751976-1980South Africa 1945-19751976-1993Soviet Union/Russia 1945-2000Syria 1990-2000Taiwan 1975-1993United Kingdom 1945-1956United States 1940-1972Vietnam 1988-1993 and evidence. In brief, the first issue involves a lack of clarity about the core concepts under investigation. ...
Chemical and biological weapons (CBWs) have often been characterized as a “poor man's atomic bomb”: a cheap and easy to acquire alternative to nuclear weapons that is particularly appealing to so-called Third World states. This idea is also reflected in Western government and expert estimates that have long exaggerated the spread of CBWs, especially among states in the Global South. In this article, I break down the ways in which the idea that the spread of CBWs is prevalent and that it primarily happens among states in the Global South has come to exist and persist. By dissecting an oft-cited dataset on CBW spread, I unravel frequently occurring methodological flaws—such as conceptual confusion, misinterpretation of sources, and a bias toward proliferation charges originating from the US government—that breed and sustain inflated estimates and faulty allegations. Subsequently, I show that a dominant cognitive framework that centers on the metaphorical use of the terms “proliferation” and “poor man's atomic bomb” primes analysts and policymakers to interpret the history and future of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons as being characterized by inevitable spread, particularly among the non-Western “Other.” In conclusion, I offer ways to counter the orthodoxies of this ideology in teaching, research, and policy.
... 5 For work engaging with and complicating this representation of women's protests see Eschle (2017). from and superior to the non-western 'other' (Gusterson 1999). The dominant narrative of the development of nuclear weapons in the Manhattan Project reproduces such understandings. ...
Bringing a feminist perspective to the global politics of nuclear weapons not only allows us to expand who and what counts as worthy of study in nuclear politics, but also contests core ideas and narratives that have shaped the literature to date. This paper asks how telling feminist nuclear stories rooted in an understanding of the everyday impacts of nuclear weapons challenges the traditional nuclear history. The standard history of ‘the bomb’ focuses on the military-industrial development of the Manhattan Project in the context of World War II, focusing on the figure of the elite male scientist as embodying the unique moral dilemmas of a new ‘nuclear age’. Feminist stories of the development of the first atomic weapons can instead illuminate the marginalised bodies and expansive, everyday harms of the development of nuclear weapons technology, altering both the timeline and the space of nuclear politics.
... This is the sine qua non for new scholarship reflecting on the complexities of the nuclear ambitions of "the other" in general and on Iranian nuclear ambitions in particular. 113 ...
In this article, we interrogate some of the central assumptions in the literature on Iran's nuclear behavior, including the role of the United States as a benevolent hegemon, the revisionist character of the Iranian government, the utility and efficacy of sanctions, and the widespread assumption that Iran is bent on obtaining and even using the bomb. We maintain that contemporary debates on the Iranian nuclear issue display similarities to Kremlinology during the Cold War, being deeply politicized and subject to bias and self-censorship. We conclude by highlighting ways for scholars to recast the discussion.
... 5 Such mythologising is particularly apparent in relation to the 1 Bronson 2015. 2 On the 'Americanization' of the Manhattan Project see Laucht 2009. 3 For more on the colonial character and implied cultural hierarchy of nuclear technology, see Biswas 2014;Williams 2011;Muppidi 2005;Gusterson 1999. 4 Bird and Sherwin 2005, xi. 5 Norris 1997. ...
This paper contributes a novel way to theorise the power of narratives of nuclear weapons politics through Kenneth Burke's concept of entelechy: the means of stating a things essence through narrating its beginning or end. The paper argues that the Manhattan Project functions narratively in nuclear discourse as an origin myth, so that the repeated telling of atomic creation over time frames the possibilities of nuclear politics today. By linking Burke's work on entelechy with literature on narrative and eschatology, the paper develops a theoretical grounding for understanding the interconnection of the nuclear past, present, and future. The paper supports its argument by conducting a wide-ranging survey of academic and popular accounts of the development of the atomic weapon in the US Manhattan Project. It reveals a dominant narrative across these accounts that contains three core tropes: the nuclear weapon as the inevitable and perfected culmination of humankind's tendency towards violence; the Manhattan Project as a race against time; and the nuclear weapon as a product of a fetishized masculine brilliance.
... Literature across IR, postcolonial studies and anthropology has critiqued the power structures and imbalances at play in the use of responsibility in the realm of nuclear weapons and its link to western ideas of 'standards of civilisation'. Work such as that of Hugh Gusterson (1999) and Shampa Biswas (2014) questions the orientalist assumptions of a feminised 'third world' which is portrayed as comprising of potentially less responsible nuclear actors in contrast to more 'reasonable' and 'responsible' nuclear states. The use of ideas of rationality and reasonability within the literature on responsibility can smuggle in ethnocentric assumptions. ...
... 12 Moral superiority is just one feature of India's nuclear exceptionalism, but it possesses great disruptive potential in view of the implicit assumption of much nuclear discourse, particularly in the United States, that implicitly frames non-Western states as irresponsible stewards of nuclear technology. 13 Certain exceptionalist ideas about Pakistan's nuclear programme also resist and challenge the ways in which Muslim countries have been disproportionately subject to anxiety about the spread of nuclear weapons. The connection between Islam and the bomb originated in Pakistan in the early 1970s, where nuclear weapons held promise to enhance the country's status within the so-called Muslim world. ...
Area Studies is the typically interdisciplinary and close study of specific geographical areas of the world. In its more successful forms, it engages in knowledge production that is self-reflexive, methodologically and theoretically aware, and wary of the application of generalised models to localised conditions. Area Studies promises the deep empiricism that can access local-actor theorisations of the international and undo the Western-centrism of International Relations (IR). At the same time, IR’s recourse to Area Studies throws up perceptions of risk among some thinkers of the international: of fragmenting the discipline into regional or national silos and thereby producing new parochial formations, an alternate politics of domination and silencing, and ultimately, theoretical degeneration. It is the perception of these risks that I refer to in this short essay as ‘siloisation anxiety’ and to which I seek to respond by embracing an unlikely analytical resource and counterforce: exceptionalism. I make two analytical moves: framing exceptionalism first, as inherently extra-local and second, as a useful method of casing. Then, to illustrate my argument, I draw briefly on narratives of nuclear exceptionalism in South Asia and examine the relational work they do in framing the global in the local.
... First, scholars have highlighted the ways in which the advent of the Nuclear Age signified a global condition that defined nuclear power as a new form of reproducing insiders and outsiders interwoven with what Hugh Gusterson has called 'nuclear orientalism'. 113 This has been epitomised by the distinction between the nuclear 'Haves' and the 'Have Nots'. 114 In addition, useful accounts of cases concerning the intersection of technology, modernity, national identity, culture, and state-building have also been provided. ...
In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in how International Relations theory can contribute to our understanding of the impact of technology on global politics, underpinned mainly by an engagement with Science and Technology Studies (STS). However, less attention has been paid to the ways in which international society shapes technology. Building on sociological and historical studies of science and technology, this article outlines one way through which international society has constituted technology by developing a synthetic account of the emergence of technological advancement as a ‘standard of civilisation’ in the nineteenth century that differentiated the ‘society of civilised states’ from non-European societies, with a particular focus on China and India. In doing so, this article also highlights how this process has had a powerful and enduring influence on Chinese and Indian conceptions about science and technology. Thus, by shifting the focus from how technology shapes global politics to how international society shapes technology, this article provides new insights into the relationship between technology, power, and modernity in an interdisciplinary context. It also offers a new way of thinking about the complex dynamics of today's global politics of technology.
... Research has shown that being socialized in an occupation's norms, values, and traditions can deeply shape people's ways of thinking and acting (e.g., Van Maanen and Barley 1984, Bechky 2011, and Anteby et al. 2016. For example, Gusterson (1999) showed that nuclear-weapons scientists were socialized to see their work as important to preserving peace, and this worldview carried on during much of their career. In a different setting, Cahill (1999) revealed how death was normalized in the mortuary profession and permeated morticians' ways of relating to families of the deceased. ...
Becoming a manager is generally seen as a highly coveted step up the career ladder that corresponds to a gain in responsibility. There is evidence, however, that some individuals experience "managerial blues" or disenchantment with their managerial jobs after being promoted. While past scholarship points to individual differences (such as skills inadequacy) or the promotion circumstances (such as involuntary) as possible explanations for such blues, less is known as to how the expectations that people carry with them from past jobs – such as expectations about what responsibility entails – may shape their first managerial experience. To answer this question, we compare the experiences of supervisors coming from different jobs – i.e., former Paris subway drivers (working independently and impacting the lives of others) and station agents (working interdependently with limited impact on others’ lives) – that left them with distinct sets of expectations around responsibility. Drawing on interviews and observations, we find that former drivers developed a deep sense of "personal" responsibility. After promotion, their perceived managerial responsibility paled in comparison to their expectations of what it felt like to have personal responsibility, leading the majority to experience managerial blues. In contrast, former agents had few expectations of what responsibility entailed and reported no disenchantment once they joined the managerial ranks. Overall, we show how imprinted expectations shape people’s future managerial experiences, including their managerial blues, and discuss the implications of our findings for literatures on job mobility and job design.
... Since the above imaginative elements depend foundationally on the 'clandestineness' of the facilities observed, the interpretability of the facility as hidden serves as a trait selected on for passage of images between overlapping social worlds, and emerges as a shared commitment within and between those worlds. These interpretations borrow from and reinforce broader orientalist tropes of nuclear nonproliferation discourse (Gusterson, 1999;Said, 1978). ...
How has commercial remote sensing influenced the framing of public narratives about nuclear programs and weapons of mass destruction? This article examines an early and formative case: In 2002, a Washington-based nongovernmental organization used commercial satellite images to publicly identify the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran. The episode helped inaugurate the ‘Iran nuclear crisis’ as we have known it since. But it also played a role in fomenting a commercial market for remote sensing, adjusting the role of ‘citizen scientist’ in the nuclear arms-control community, visualizing a new television journalism beat of ‘covering the intelligence community’, legitimizing a transforming role of nuclear safeguards inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and solidifying Iran’s nuclear program as ‘clandestine’. This article follows the images as they pass through these social worlds and examines how heterogenous actors incorporated remote sensing into their identities and commitments to global transparency.
... 2 Partly due to the author's limitations, this account privileges Western states, institutions, and viewpoints. For alternate perspectives, see Das (2003), Frey (2006b), and Gusterson (1999). ...
Nuclear deterrence" describes how states use nuclear weapons to discourage the aggression of other states by threatening them with nuclear punishment. "Communication" is commonly associated with theories and policies of nuclear deterrence (e.g., as a requirement for its effectiveness). Deeper exploration, however, uncovers at least four co-existing images of communication: as "Information," "Interaction," "Signification," and "Discourse." This chapter clarifies the premises, functions, and implications of these images. It argues that scholars and policymakers benefit from greater appreciation for the distinctiveness of communication as a complex phenomenon that is conceptualized and practiced differently across deterrence spheres. A brief case study of symbolism developed in the U.S.-North Korean deterrence relationship illustrates the benefits of communicative analysis.
... 9. See Hodges and Nilep (2007b) for a review of multidisciplinary work that has examined the reactions to and depictions of the terrorist attacks. Das (2003), Frey (2006b), and Gusterson (1999). ...
The Handbook of Communication and Security provides a comprehensive collection and synthesis of communication scholarship that engages security at multiple levels, including theoretical vs. practical, international vs. domestic, and public vs. private. The handbook includes chapters that leverage communication-based concepts and theories to illuminate and influence contemporary security conditions. Collectively, these chapters foreground and analyze the role of communication in shaping the economic, technological, and cultural contexts of security in the 21st century. This book is ideal for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars in the numerous subfields of communication and security studies.
... The figure of absolute evil is the nuclear terrorist, utterly irrational and incapable of being deterred. Gusterson (1999) and Biswas (2014) argue that the discourse of nonproliferation distracts policy attention from the tremendous dangers posed by the existing arsenals of the nuclear powers, essentially transferring the anxieties produced by the nuclear taboo onto a scapegoated pariah (c.f. Girard 2001). ...
This article uses Mary Douglas’ landmark theorization of purity and danger to explore the development of the ‘nuclear taboo’ and ICAN’s creative manipulation of discourses of nuclear pollution. ICAN placed people who had long been marginalized by nuclear diplomacy – survivors, women, indigenous people, civilians, representatives of small states – at the center of the conversation about nuclear weapons. In doing so, ICAN deconstructed discourses legitimating nuclear weapons, revealing the ambivalence and fear underneath diplomatic euphemism. ICAN also turned the stigma associated with nuclear weapons onto those who defended them. I conclude by reflecting on the importance in being transparent about how pariah status for a weapon is socially constructed. Openly discussing the process of stigmatization need not undermine or delegitimize it. Rather, seeing pariah status as a political process enables us to have a conversation about how to address threats to human security without resorting to coercive control.
... The racial logic of "order-maintenance" police is repeated with the non-logic of nuclear-holding countries like the U.S. who believe that nuclear weapons are most dangerous in the hands of "Third World" leaders (see Gusterson 1999 for details). In both situations those in power say that the "other" are dangerous, when in fact the centralized and ultimate power that defines (known as state violence) is the actual source of the threat (see Sardar 1998 for more on the social power to define). ...
Abstract
The spectre of another nuclear war seems to be on the horizon, and is at least a major rhetorical thread weaved into the discourse of global power currently. The psychological impact of nuclear war adds to the everyday threat of police violence, especially so for African-Americans (and all people of color) due to their unique relationship with policing. This paper uses a recent antagonistic quote from the President of the United States as a springboard to examine the histories of both nuclear war and racist policing in order to link them to present realities.
Keywords: nuclear, social, black, protest, war
... Realist analysis tends to define nuclear order in terms of the relative distribution of material power amongst major states under anarchy that dictates why states do or do not acquire nuclear weapons with little or no explanatory room for institutions, norms, culture or structures of social relations (for example Bracken, 2004, p. 155;Ruhle, 2007). Discursive analysis centers on the productive power of nuclear discourses (see below) but tends to limit discussion of power in global nuclear politics to this domain (for example Cohn, 1987;Gusterson, 1999;Moshirzadeh, 2007). Other accounts rooted in liberalism and English School theory explain nuclear order in terms of the collection of formal international organizations established to control, limit, and monitor nuclear weapons, technologies, and materials, especially the NPT (for example Horsburgh, 2015;Kapur, 2000;Roberts, 2007). ...
The notion of a “global nuclear order” has entered the lexicon of nuclear politics. The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has prompted further questions about how we understand it. Yet missing from analysis of nuclear order and the “Ban Treaty” is a critical analysis of the power relations that constitute that order. This article develops a critical account of global nuclear order by applying Robert Cox's concept of hegemony and power to the global politics of nuclear weapons, drawing on the politics of the Ban Treaty. It theorizes a “nuclear control order” as a hegemonic structure of power, one that has been made much more explicit through the negotiation of the Ban Treaty. This fills a void by taking hegemony and power seriously in theorizing nuclear order, as well as explaining both the meaning of the Ban Treaty and its limits.
... If there is a silver lining, it is that Trump's behavior has likely put a sizeable dent in the "orientalist" discourse that non-Western nuclear states are irrational, while Western states are "responsible" nuclear powers. 19 This has led to the most serious scrutiny of U.S. nuclear use procedures in decades. Alarmed members of Congress called for review of the president's unilateral authority to launch nuclear weapons. ...
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/r44WxzkePQ9dp3Jfghb2/full
... 27 Indeed, the terms 'responsible' and 'irresponsible' have long served as a labelling device to praise or chastise states that accept or challenge global nuclear order. 28 As we will argue, China and India have taken numerous steps to establish their responsible status in line with dominant, intersubjective standards of nuclear responsibility, and they have been largely successful in being recognised as nuclear responsibles. ...
China and India, as rising powers, have been proactive in seeking status as nuclear responsibles. Since the 1990s they have sought to demonstrate conformity with intersubjectively accepted understandings of nuclear responsibility within the global nuclear order, and have also sought recognition on the basis of particularistic practices of nuclear restraint. This article addresses two puzzles. First, nuclear restraint is at the centre of the pursuit of global nuclear order, so why have China and India not received recognition from influential members of the nuclear order for the full spectrum of their restraint-based behaviours? Second, why do China and India nonetheless persist with these behaviours? We argue that the conferral of status as a nuclear responsible is a politicised process shaped by the interests, values, and perceptions of powerful stakeholder states in the global nuclear order. China’s and India’s innovations are not incorporated into the currently accepted set of responsible nuclear behaviours because, indirectly, they pose a strategic, political, and social challenge to these states. However, China’s and India’s innovations are significant as an insight into their identity-projection and preferred social roles as distinctive rising powers, and as a means of introducing new, if nascent, ideas into non-proliferation practice and governance.
... Biswas, 'Nuclear Apartheid ', p. 495. 7 IAEA, NPT, p. 4. 8 Hugh Gusterson (1999), 'Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination', Cultural Anthropology, 14(1), p. 129. 9 ...
... Diese Rolle von Nuklearwaffen ist umso wichtiger als die konventionellen Streitkräfte Nordkoreas mit gravierenden Herausforderungen konfrontiert zu sein scheinen. Zwar weisen die Streitkräfte eine massive personelle Stärke von mehr als einer Millionen aktiver SoldatInnen auf (International Institute for Strategic Studies 2016, S. 264), jedoch haben sie gleichzeitig mit einer Überalterung des Geräts sowie mit Problemen in der Versorgung mit Nahrung und Treibstoffen zu kämpfen (Cordesman und Lin 2015, S. 79;IISS 2016, S. 264;Chanlett-Avery et al. 2016, S. 17-18 (Gusterson 1999). Eben diesen "nuklearen Orientalismus" (Gusterson 1999, S. 113-116) für die beteiligten Großmächte wenig attraktiv, da sie deren Anspruch als Garanten regionaler Sicherheit unterminieren und damit ein zweifelhaftes Signal an weitere, potenzielle Aspiranten militärischer Nukleartechnologie senden würde. ...
Zusammenfassung
Der Artikel diskutiert Strategien im Umgang mit Nordkoreas Nuklearwaffenprogramm. Das zentrale Argument lautet, dass schrittweises engagement, das positive Anreize an die Umsetzung mehrerer Phasen von Rüstungskontrolle bindet, die aussichtsreichste Strategie hinsichtlich einer Verhaltensänderung Nordkoreas darstellt. Strategien der Resignation, der Sanktion und der militärischen Eskalation werden als nicht zielführend oder zu risikoreich abgehandelt. Auf absehbare Zeit kann demnach lediglich das Ausmaß des nordkoreanischen Nuklearwaffenprogrammes begrenzt werden, während dessen Existenz nicht mehr Verhandlungsgegenstand sein kann.
... So argumentiert etwa Brian Michael Jenkins (2008, 281), dass terroristische Bewegungen eine hohe Sensibilität bezüglich der Publicity-Kosten ihrer Anschläge an den Tag legen und aufgrund ihrer Rationalität prinzipiell abschreckbar sind. 7 Siehe hierzu ebenfalls Gusterson (1999). 8 Bezug nehmend auf die Arbeit von Harrington de Santana fasst Wilson dieses Argument wie folgt zusammen: ...
In the recent past, the literature on the demand-side of nuclear proliferation has extended its theoretical focus to domestic and ideational variables. While these approaches have enhanced our understanding of the demand-side, they still neglect the central aspect of individual and social learning about nuclear weapons. In this article I argue that linguistic approaches allow us to address this gap in the literature as they enable us to analyze the mechanisms of nuclear learning.
Since the late 1990s, the critical study of security has crystallised into a professional field of study – Critical Security Studies (CSS) – complete with theoretical schools, journals, and disciplinary narratives that recount its birth and development. The establishment of CSS as a separate field of inquiry distinct from conventional approaches to security is a remarkable achievement but has also come at a price. We argue that this is especially apparent in relation to the limited role Cold War history plays in CSS. Disciplinary narratives of the field tend to conflate the Cold War period with conventional security theory or strategic studies, thus downplaying the originality and importance of critical perspectives articulated during this protracted conflict. Emphasising the deep entanglements of the Cold War nuclear arms race with questions of ecological contamination, democracy, race, and decolonisation, we argue that these intersections are worth revisiting as intellectual precursors and foundations for CSS. We briefly illustrate this argument by highlighting important challenges to conventional security thinking that were formulated at three interconnected sites during the early Cold War: the 1955 Bandung Conference, Pan-African resistance to French nuclear testing in Algeria, and African-American anti-nuclear activism.
Scholars of international politics have long linked states’ quest for prestige with assertions of national power: diplomatic saber-rattling, scrambles for colonies, arms races, and outright war. This thesis charts a sharply divergent, previously neglected, path to international prestige—foreign policy restraint. The argument in brief is that states seek prestige by conspicuously holding back from the use of power and thereby spurning opportunities for national gain. Departing from the prevailing conception of restraint as merely a kind of inaction, this thesis reframes restraint as a performance. Performances of restraint are constituted intersubjectively when a state is perceived to refrain from pursuing its interests to the extent that its power allows. Forswearing the acquisition of nuclear weapons, liquidating profitable military interventions, renouncing territorial claims, de-escalating diplomatic crises, curbing carbon emissions—each of these policies of self-limitation, and many more besides, may constitute performative restraint if recognized as volitional (emanating from the actor’s will) and supererogatory (exceeding the actor’s normative obligations). To secure others’ recognition of their performances, states appeal to existing normative standards of restraint in international society. By conspicuously exceeding those standards, states express both (1) their material capacity—the abundance of underlying resources that equips them to voluntarily forgo self- interested behavior; and (2) their moral character—the exemplary virtues that underlie their prosocial choices. When states believe that they can credibly perform restraint, triggering these signaling mechanisms, they may “hold back” from acquisitive or assertive policies in order to “rise above” others in terms of prestige. Notably, “holding back to rise above” appeals to states as an expressive strategy exactly because it is materially costly and socially non-obligatory. This thesis draws upon insights into the performative nature of restraint from cognate disciplines and everyday life, integrating them into an overarching account with reference to Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical model of social action. It illustrates how “holding back to rise above” applies in four diverse historical cases: (1) the United States’ Good Neighbor Policy of non-intervention in Latin America (1933-40); (2) Germany’s post-reunification foreign policy, culminating with its non-participation in the US “Coalition of the Willing” for the Iraq War (1991-2005); (3) India’s decades of spurning of nuclear weapons and championing non-proliferation (1964-98); and (4) China’s restraint of its carbon emissions in the context of global climate change mitigation (1992-2017). In short, the thesis contributes to a wide range of debates in IR over the sources of international prestige and the reasons for states’ costly compliance with social standards.
This article focuses on Egyptian interpretations of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US at the end of the Second World War. It surveys the reactions and responses of influential thinkers between 1945 and 1951, a crucial period prior to decolonisation. The objective of this research is to capture a specific moment in time and understand how it shaped imaginations of the future. The article argues that the bombings of Japan generated fantasies and anxieties about the postcolonial future. Intellectuals were enthusiastic about the possibilities of nuclear science and energy, but at the same time they engaged in nuanced and critical debates about the emergence of a nuclear-armed world, including its intertwinement with race and colonial power. In addition to exploring Egyptian thought on the nuclear condition, this historical analysis allows us to better understand Egyptian nuclear decision-making after independence. Revisiting this period, furthermore, illustrates the importance of imagined futures in shaping nuclear choices.
Zooming in upon the workings of the UK’s nuclear regime of truth—from Thatcher to Blair—the previous chapters have documented the considerable imagination and discursive labour that was required to keep Britain’s nuclear weapons in motion. This chapter discusses the main continuities and changes across the periods. First, a common theme has been the consistent (buck) passing of ethical responsibility for the world’s nuclear weapons problem onto other states. Second, the UK’s lack of empathy for how its nuclear weapons are perceived by other states is consistent across both periods. Third, nuclear weapons have enabled the UK to perform privileged international status: as protector of Europe during the 1980s and counter-intuitively, as a “leader” of disarmament from the early 2000s. Fourth, Thatcher’s successful securitisation of the Soviet Union has led to the nuclear peace correlation to become reified in British politics, such that it is even reproduced by British anti-nuclearists in the twenty-first century. Finally, Thatcher’s victories in the 1983 and 1987 elections have become an important discursive resource for marginalising non-nuclear security as viable policy option in domestic politics. The chapter ends by elaborating the implications of the findings for the resurgent global movement aiming to abolish nuclear weapons
Discourse analysis has over the last two decades become established in international relations scholarship, yet it is also true that discourse analysts have not always taken due care to speak to sceptics among the “mainstream”. Thus, this chapter aims to show—in plain language—how and why discourse analysis can offer additional insight into nuclear politics. The opening section evaluates the various explanations usually provided for why the UK has nuclear weapons. It is structured by Scott Sagan’s (1996) three general explanations—all found in varying degrees in the literature about UK nuclear weapon policy—for why states acquire nuclear weapons: (a) security; (b) status; and, (c) domestic political interests. It then discusses a fourth more contemporary explanation, also found in the UK literature: (d) identity explanations. Along the way, this section discusses the limitations of these explanations and aims to show how a discourse approach can augment these analyses by asking questions that conventional analysts are not equipped, nor inclined to answer, in this case: how nuclear weapons states maintain their nuclear weapons. The second half of the chapter reviews the post-positivist nuclear weapons literature that provides the theoretical foundations and some helpful pointers for this book’s analysis.
The end of the Cold War and the new international acceptance of the goal of a nuclear weapons free world provided the British government with quite broad bandwidth of possible policies; however none of them were straightforward. Renewing Trident would require a new security rationale to replace the Soviet threat, and this would need to be squared with the global disarmament agenda. Conversely, disarmament would be easy to legitimise internationally, but would face considerable domestic opposition. Labour chose the former option: renewing nuclear weapons despite the lack of an identifiable threat, while at the same time ostensibly claiming to lead global disarmament. This chapter analyses how the UK managed to make this unlikely policy position tenable. As the chapter documents, this required considerable imagination and discursive labour.
This article discusses four alternative options as to how the international community, in particular the US, could deal with the ballistic missile and nuclear program of the DPRK perceived as a grave threat to international security. The article starts with a short overview of the DPRK’s capabilities in these sectors and an interpretation of factors underlying North Korea’s nuclear program and the country’s assumed nuclear doctrine. In a next step, the article discusses the merits, shortcomings and prospects of four different options: coercive diplomacy, military strikes, deterrence and containment as well as negotiations on DPRK’s complete denuclearization. Recent negotiations between the US and North Korea on latter’s nuclear program take center stage and are dealt with at length. The article negatively assesses the prospects for achieving a negotiated complete denuclearization of the DPRK since the country’s leadership views nuclear weapons and their delivery systems as indispensable for the continued existence of both the state and the Kim regime.
The environmental implications of generating electric power from nuclear fission have been a matter of concern since the construction of the earliest nuclear reactors and power stations in the 1950s. After two or more decades of construction of nuclear power stations, this ceased in many countries, largely as a result of concerns for the environment and human health. However, the pressing need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is leading many countries to plan extensive new programmes of construction of nuclear power stations which serves to re-emphasise concerns over environmental impacts. Volume 32 of the Issues in Environmental Science and Technology series is concerned with reviewing the political and social context for nuclear power generation, the nuclear fuel cycles and their implications for the environment. Known issues of nuclear accidents, the legacy of contaminated land and low level waste, and the decommissioning of nuclear sites are considered together with a more forward look at the deep geological disposal of high level waste and the pathways of radioactive substances in the environment and their implications for human and non-human organisms. This topical work will be of interest to scientists and policy makers working within this field or related areas as well as advanced students.
Sound matters for international political sociology. Drawing upon literature from cultural geography and sound studies, we argue that sound contributes to political dynamics that are constitutive of world politics. To capture these dynamics, we offer a set of conceptual frameworks to analyze sound. First, we differentiate the concept of sound from noise and show the importance of doing so. Second, we introduce “sonic formations” as a means of capturing how sound contributes to world politics. Third, we make the case for analyzing sound's historicity, adaptability, relationality, and performativity (SHARP) in any given context. Fourth, using sonic formations and the SHARP framework, we examine an illustrative case study: the nuclear deterrence and non-proliferation regimes. By focusing on the role of sound in these regimes, our preliminary findings demonstrate the utility for the field of undertaking additional work to capture the wider significance of sound. This includes its contributions to shaping relations of power.
A strong narrative permeates international nuclear law to the effect that international law is a progressive force that is slowly but surely propelling the world towards a nuclear free future. This chapter questions and tests this narrative by examining the extent to which some of the major multilateral nuclear treaties, the ICJ cases that have touched on nuclear issues and Security Council resolutions on nuclear matters have devalued nuclear weapons. It argues that these nuclear laws fall broadly into two categories. The first category includes laws that may in some surface-level way appear to devalue nuclear weapons but in fact fail to ensure that nuclear weapons are devalued in any deep sense and in some respects actually work to reinforce the value of the weapons in particular ways. The second category of laws contains laws that devalue nuclear weapons more deeply. To date, these laws have been acceded to by only certain sectors of the international community. The final substantive part of the chapter provides some reflections on this way of thinking about international nuclear weapons law and introduces the idea that they reveal this field of international law is a deeply divided area of law prone to an idea I term ‘partialism’.
In this chapter, Casper Sylvest explores the role of nuclear weapons in intellectual history during the early decades of the Cold War, predominantly in the US and Europe. The chapter opens with a discussion of the role of nuclear weapons technology in transforming both scientific knowledge about the planet and the landscape of intellectual debate. Sylvest then turns to the conceptions of this technology among policymakers, military figures, scientists and public intellectuals. Four sites of contestation are singled out: the question of morality, the question of use, the question of stability and a more amorphous set of questions associated with the human condition in the nuclear age. In conclusion, Sylvest reflects on the nature of nuclear weapons and our historical understanding of them.
El Tratado de No Proliferación Nuclear (TNP) en vigor desde 1970 legitimó la tesis de Occidente de que hay estados más racionales y estables que otros para poseer un arsenal nuclear. Aunque las diferencias entre estados existen, una división binaria entre un mundo civilizado y racional y otro bárbaro e irracional no contribuye a explicar la diversidad de fenómenos en la arena internacional, antes bien, obtura esa posibilidad. La Guerra contra el Terrorismo, declarada por Estados Unidos en 2001, exacerbó su postura estratégica etnocéntrica y le permitió implementar políticas y acciones de contraproliferación nuclear desproporcionadas en países como Irak, Libia e Irán. A partir del análisis sobre etnocentrismo y seguridad del teórico británico de las Relaciones Internacionales, Ken Booth, el presente artículo explica las contradicciones de la narrativa dicotómica occidental en referencia a la proliferación nuclear en Oriente Medio, sintetizada en tres postulados: primero, la disuasión nuclear no es posible debido a la inestabilidad política de los actores; segundo, los países de Oriente Medio carecen de capacidades técnicas para la posesión de armas nucleares y tercero, el gasto militar nuclear contraviene al desarrollo de estos países.
Cambridge Core - Global History - The Making of Global International Relations - by Amitav Acharya
The Making of Global International Relations - by Amitav Acharya February 2019
Gender perspective is currently being mainstreamed in the context of security, disarmament, non-proliferation and arms control. Since gender is not just about women and girls but also relates to men and boys, gender perspective must be balanced and take into account the broad socio-cultural context as a whole. The adverse effects of nuclear detonations may impinge on the right to life and encroach upon a number of other civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights among which the right to family life, health, education, property and housing. It has become apparent that the use and testing of nuclear weapons affect differently men and boys, women and girls, both physically and in the context of society, hindering their ability to fully exercise their basic human rights. Gender-aware assistance is needed to contribute reducing the adverse consequences of nuclear detonations for the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities. Gender perspective may help redirect debates concerning nuclear weapons towards a greater consideration of human factors, and ultimately reshape the strategies for security, disarmament, non-proliferation and arms control. Women’s engagement in the struggle for peace and disarmament is extremely relevant and should gain more influence, while involving more women in nuclear issues, at both national and international level, could enhance the non-proliferation and disarmament agenda. However, only if women and men are able to work together within governments, international organisations and civil society with full awareness of, and respect for, their respective roles, diversities and needs, effective and sustainable solutions on issues of nuclear disarmament can be achieved.
The 2017 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was negotiated at the UN over the objections of nuclear-armed and -allied states and established a global categorical ban on nuclear weapons framed in terms of humanitarianism, human rights and environmentalism. The TPNW also placed ‘positive obligations’ on states to assist victims of nuclear weapons use and testing and remediate contaminated environments. States and NGOs from the Pacific region advocated for a strong treaty text, particularly its positive obligations. They were influenced by the region’s history as a site of nuclear weapons testing in Marshall Islands, Kiribati and French Polynesia/Te Ao Maohi; the 1985 South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone’s precedent; and earlier diplomatic efforts and activism linking denuclearization with decolonization. In doing so, Pacific and other formerly colonized states flipped the ‘standard of civilization’ script embedded in humanitarian disarmament law and applied it to their former colonizers. The paper demonstrates the agency of small states—the ‘-Pacific’ part of ‘Asia-Pacific’—in multilateral policymaking on peace and security, often overlooked in international relations scholarship. It draws on my participant observation in the Nobel Peace Prize-winning advocacy of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) during the TPNW negotiations.
In 2015 the European Group of Organization Studies released a call for papers highlighting poor knowledge of employee imagination in organizations. To address this need, the current study hypothesizes employee imagination consisting of seven conditions common to the organizational experience of Chinese Entrepreneurs.
The current paper reviews the Chinese enterprising context. Cases from China are used to illustrate the effects of proposed conditions and their value for entrepreneurs and innovators in businesses undergoing change.
Employee imagination underpins and conditions how Chinese employees make sense of their organisations and better understand the process of organisational change. From the viewpoint of human resource management, emphasis on coaching and developing imagination enables businesses to stay competitive and adapt to environmental demands such as lack of information, too much information, or the need for new information. The proposed conditions apply to the Chinese context, however, their application to wider contexts is suggested and requires attention. Theoretically, our research adds new insights to knowledge of a poorly understood organizational behavior topic – employee imagination. Practically, the research findings provide mangers with knowledge of conditions, which could be adopted as powerful tools in facilitating organizational change management
This paper provides an analysis of the links between national identity and technoscience. To do this, we will study the meanings of nation that are developed on two ceremonies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of institutions dedicated to the production of science and technology in France and Argentina: the headquarters of the Commissariat à lEnergie Atomique in Grenoble and Instituto Balseiro, a training center of the National Atomic Energy Commission in Bariloche. We will show how the meanings of nation activate and justify speeches and practices associated with technoscientific production focusing on the resources through which technoscience is incorporated into every celebration. The proposal is framed within ethnographic research including among its methods, the development of in-depth interviews and participant observation of daily situations or beyond daily situations from a comparative perspective.
Liberal values are under siege from terrorism, but questions exist concerning Eurocentric notions of terrorism and the source of supposedly illegitimate violence.In the post 9/11 geopolitical landscape, “conventional wisdom holds that governments reactively restrict rights to forestall additional attacks…to more effectively pursue suspected terrorists.” Terrorism violates the fundamental human rights of its victims to life, liberty, security, and dignity of the individual. In the face of increasing terrorism and terrorist attacks, governments around the world have taken steps to bolster security at the cost of liberty. Juxtaposed against the backdrop of civil European responses to terrorism, this approach is especially evident within U.S. military institutions and counter-terrorism regimes. Despite new geopolitical realities of asymmetric, non-conventional and transnational warfare, liberal values and human rights principles should not be abandoned, such that existing standards of human rights can nonetheless accommodate an appropriate balance between liberty and security. This essay will serve to critically examine counter-terror responses in the context of human rights standards. A clear overlap between international human rights law (HRL) and international humanitarian law (IHL) is evidenced by the co-current guarantees of non-derogable physical integrity rights. State pre-commitments to HRL and IHL principles, serve to establish a consistent, morally authoritative, legally affirmed, human rights approach to counter-terrorism. As the West struggles with terrorist threats – actors who do not operate within ‘acceptable’ norms of belligerent conduct, it is crucial that we ask how ‘our’ security can be safeguarded without undermining those very same norms.
In this chapter, I introduce the topic by showing that US-India relations could be characterized as estranged and were marked by dramatic oscillations. Following this discussion, I will refer to the construction of security issues/problems related to India and security policies toward India within the discourse from Roosevelt through Bush Sr. during five periods. As the chapter will demonstrate, the US security policies toward India were often tied to the US containment policy—they were constructed as more important—which limited other policy options toward India within the discourse.
These five periods are as follows: the US interest in pre-independent India during the Second World War and afterward (1939–1947); the disinterest of both the Truman and the first Eisenhower administrations (1947–1957); India’s growing importance for both the second Eisenhower and the Kennedy administrations (1957–1963); the unraveling of relations under both the Johnson and the Nixon administrations (1964–1974); and a slight improvement in US-India relations under the Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations as several security issues were articulated (1974–1992).
After this discussion, I provide an overview of the attributes which were attached to India’s and US subject-positions within the underlying policy discourses from the Roosevelt until the Bush Sr. administrations. During these five time periods, various meanings were attached to the USA and India. Several themes became particularly salient: those about development, non-alignment, democracy, and instability were articulated throughout these periods and after the Cold War. They re-emerged in different forms and at different instances.
This chapter highlights that there has been a continuous interest in India since the second Clinton administration. However, there is often a focus on a specific event, such as the nuclear test in 1998, or President Clinton as an explanatory variable, instead of changing discourses underlying these policy changes.
I show that US security policies toward India changed during the Clinton administration. Initially, the Clinton administration conducted conflicting US policies. During the start of Clinton’s second administration, however, the administration pursued a closer US-India relationship even though India’s nuclear tests were constructed as a major security issue. In fact, when the Kargil crisis took place in 1999, in which Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate sent troops over the Line of Control into Kashmir near Kargil, the USA demanded that Pakistan troops would retreat.
These changing security policies toward India were made possible by particular representations of Indian and the US representations within the US policy discourse. From 1997 onward, prior to the nuclear tests, India started to be constructed differently. India’s large economic growth started to become more salient as made evident by the discussions of the Kyoto Protocol and high technology. Combining development and instability themes, the Clinton administration articulated India as a growing economy held back by conflict, alongside other representations.
Can religion bring something distinct, critical and useful to global politics? Or do the voices of religious actors mimic those of secular NGOs when given opportunities to speak truth to power in international diplomacy? This article examines these questions through the lens of nuclear disarmament, considering the role of the Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches at the 2015 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. While faith communities have had a potent role in pushing for nuclear disarmament, the article argues that much more can be done by religious actors to argue that nuclear weapons are a stain on the moral conscience of people of faith.
This article explores how changing US security policies toward India were enabled by policy discourses. Since the second Clinton administration, the United States has shown a continuous interest in India. In order to analyze this, the article makes use of a critical constructivist approach in which phenomena are seen as socially constructed. It reveals how meanings are produced and attached to objects such as the United States and India within policy discourses. In policy discourses, security policies are not merely solutions to security issues: Policy discourses help to construct how security problems, objects, and subjects should be understood, and they simultaneously articulate security policies to solve the issues. These policy discourses enable and constrain foreign policy options available to foreign policy-makers. This article demonstrates that in 1997, India’s subject-position transformed, which made possible future policy changes in US foreign policy toward India.
The dominant paradigm of international relations theory has long seen influence over nuclear arsenals as the preserve of presidents, premiers and generals of the world's great powers, not underfunded activists, feminist campaigners, radical nuns or even diplomats of small states. The approach of this special section could not be more different. In fact, we have intentionally curated a collection of articles that try to ‘de-center’ the academic conversation about nuclear weapons. The inspiration for our approach comes from the Humanitarian Initiative on Nuclear Weapons, which since its emergence after the 2010 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has dramatically reshaped the diplomatic discussions on nuclear disarmament, led by small states and middle powers. The shift in discourse has been accelerated by revitalized civil society action, represented by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a global NGO coalition, as well as renewed calls for disarmament from religious leaders – most notably Pope Francis. This special section, written from the perspective of scholars and practitioners associated with the Humanitarian Initiative, examines its dimensions and its potential impact on global policy making.
Perhaps the best-documented epidemic in the history of medicine, kuru has been studied for more than fifty years by international investigators from medicine and the human sciences. This significantly revised edition of the landmark anthropological classic Kuru Sorcery brings up to date the anthropological contribution to understanding disease, the medical research that resulted in two medical Nobel Prizes, and the views of the Fore people who endured the epidemic and who still believe that sorcerers, rather than cannibalism, caused kuru. The kuru epidemic serves as a prism through which to see how Fore notions of disease causation bring into single focus their views about the body, the world of social and spiritual relations, and changes in economic and political conditions-aspects of thought and behaviour that Western medicine keeps separate.
In his discussion of power, Foucault establishes a new, interpretation that challenges the typical view of power as a possession held by certain people and groups in a society. Foucault argues that it is the set of force relations that constitute a perpetual struggle among people as well as the strategies that people employ as they attempt to control the behavior of others. This differs from previous views of power in that it sees power as existing everywhere and deriving from everywhere. No person holds power. Rather, power is expressed in relationships between people. Related to this view is Foucault's argument that resistance is inextricably linked with power and also exists everywhere. No single point of power or resistance can be found. Each point at where power is exercised also reveals a point of resistance. Power is also intimately connected with discourse because discourse becomes a mechanism of power. Not only is discourse both an instrument and an effect of power, but discourse can serve both to liberate and oppress.
The Rise and Fall of the Freeze Social Problems in Postindustrial Society Atomic Scientists Movement and the Bulletin Ban the Bomb The Freeze Origins, Growth and Decline The Freeze Strategy, Tactics and Social Control Beyond the Freeze
What if. ... To question what should and what could be done to maintain the nonproliferation regime if the conference that decides on the extension of the NPT is unable to agree on a significant prolongation of its life is not particularly rewarding. International politics is an area where the recognition that something should be done and, indeed, could be done, does not always mean that it will be done, however reasonable it would be to do it. Logically, therefore, if one raises the question, one must also discuss what will be done, or rather, since the future is uncertain, what one thinks might happen if no agreement is reached on a substantial extension of the treaty’s duration.
Nuclear war is possible. But unlike Armageddon, the apocalyptic war prophesied to end history, nuclear war can have a wide range of possible outcomes. Many commentators and senior US government officials consider it a nonsurvivable event. The popularity of this view in Wasington has such a pervasive and malign effect upon American defense planning that it is rapidly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for the United States.
The conditions that have made for decades of peace in the West are fast disappearing, as Europe prepares to return to the multi-polar system that, between 1648 and 1945, bred one destructive conflict after another Peace: it's wonderful. I like it as much as the next man, and have no wish to be willfully gloomy at a moment when optimism about the future shape of the world abounds. Nevertheless my thesis in this essay is that we are likely soon to regret the passing of the Cold War. To be sure, no one will miss such by-products of the Cold War as the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. No one will want to replay the U-2 affair, the Cuban missile crisis, or the building of the Berlin Wall. And no one will want to revisit the domestic Cold War, with its purges and loyalty oaths, its xenophobia and stifling of dissent. We will not wake up one day to discover fresh wisdom in the collected fulminations of John Foster Dulles. We may, however, wake up one day lamenting the loss of the order that the Cold War gave to the anarchy of international relations. For untamed anarchy is what Europe knew in the forty-five years of this century before the Cold War, and untamed anarchy--Hobbes's war of all against all--is a prime cause of armed conflict. Those who think that armed conflicts among the European states are now out of the question, that the two world wars burned all the war out of Europe, are projecting unwarranted optimism onto the future. The theories of peace that implicitly undergird this optimism are notably shallow constructs. They stand up to neither logical nor historical analysis. You would not want to bet the farm on their prophetic accuracy. The world is about to conduct a vast test of the theories of war and peace put forward by social scientists, who never dreamed that their ideas would be tested by the world-historic events announced almost daily in newspaper headlines. This social scientist is willing to put his theoretical cards on the table as he ventures predictions about the future of Europe. In the process, I hope to put alternative theories of war and peace under as much intellectual pressure as I can muster. My argument is that the prospect of major crises, even wars, in Europe is likely to increase dramatically now that the Cold War is receding into history. The next forty-five years in Europe are not likely to be so violent as the forty-five years before the Cold War, but they are likely to be substantially more violent than the past forty-five years, the era that we may someday look back upon not as the Cold War but as the Long Peace, in John Lewis Gaddis's phrase.
The first shock administered by the Soviet launching of Sputnik has almost dissipated. The flurry of statements and investigations and improvised responses has died down, leaving a small residue: a slight increase in the schedule of bomber and ballistic missile production, with a resulting small increment in our defense expenditures for the current fiscal year; a considerable enthusiasm for space travel; and some stirrings of interest in the teaching of mathematics and physics in the secondary schools. Western defense policy has almost returned to the level of activity and the emphasis suited to the basic assumptions which were controlling before sputnik.
The threat posed by nuclear weapons has shifted dramatically in the aftermath of the Cold War. The long-standing prospect of Armageddon has all but disappeared, while the change of local nuclear conflict among undeclared nuclear weapons has grown. The danger is especially acute in South Asia, which, in strategic terms, embraces the subcontinent and parts of China, Central Asia, and the Middle East. The situation with regards to India and Pakistan is discussed at length.
Gordon H. Chang is a historian at the International Strategic Institute at Stanford University and Coordinator of the Project on Peace and Cooperation in the Asian-Pacific Region.
The author would like to thank Barton Bernstein, David Kennedy, and John Lewis for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article and the MacArthur Foundation for financial support.
1. The pinyin romanization system will be used for Chinese names in this essay, except in the title. Traditional spellings will appear in parentheses after the first use of the pinyin.
2. Robert Anderson to Eisenhower, September 3, 1954, Dwight D. Eisenhower Papers as President of the United States, 1953-1961 (Ann Whitman File), Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas, hereafter Eisenhower Papers (AW), Dulles-Herter Series, Box 3, Dulles, Sept. 1954 (2); Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (New York: Doubleday, 1963), p. 459.
3. Marquis William Childs, Eisenhower: Captive Hero, A Critical Study of the General and the President (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), pp. 188-212, 204, 291; Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), pp. 262-273; Foster Rhea Dulles, American Policy Toward Communist China, 1949-1969 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972), pp. 130-160; Peter Lyon, Eisenhower: Portrait of the Hero (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), pp. 632, 637, 853-54. Other literature on the 1954-55 crisis: O. Edmund Clubb, "Formosa and the Offshore Islands in American Foreign Policy, 1950-1955," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Dec. 1959), pp. 517-31; Morton H. Halperin and Tang Tsou, "United States Policy toward the Offshore Islands," Public Policy, Vol. 15 (1966), pp. 119-38; Alexander George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), pp. 266-94; J.H. Kalicki, The Pattern of Sino-American Crises: Political-Military Interactions in the 1950s (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 120-155; and Thomas E. Stolper, China, Taiwan, and the Offshore Islands (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1985).
4. Leonard H. D. Gordon, "United States Opposition to Use of Force in the Taiwan Strait, 1954-1962," Journal of American History, Vol. 72, No. 3 (December 1985), pp. 637-660. See also Robert Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower, Vol. II: The President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985); and Bennett C. Rushkoff, "Eisenhower, Dulles and the Quemoy-Matsu Crisis, 1954-1955," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 96, No. 3 (Fall 1981), pp. 465-480.
5. Declassified material used in this essay includes memoranda of discussions between Eisenhower and his advisers and of top-level policy-making meetings, diary entries, cables, correspondence, and position papers. The federal government has released many of these documents in just the last few years, and they are kept in different locations throughout the country. The Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas holds the Dwight D. Eisenhower Papers as President of the United States, 1953-1961 (Ann Whitman File), (hereafter Eisenhower Papers [AW]); John Foster Dulles Papers, 1951-1959 (hereafter Dulles Papers); and papers from the White House Office, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (hereafter WHO OSANSA). The National Archives in Washington, D.C., in its Diplomatic Branch, holds papers from the Department of State and, in its Military Branch, papers from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Many State Department documents for the period covered by this essay are reproduced in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS). The Seeley G. Mudd Library of Princeton University holds the personal papers of John Foster Dulles (hereafter Princeton Dulles Papers), and the Karl Lott Rankin Papers.
6. George and Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy, pp. 266-74; Stewart Alsop, "The Story Behind Quemoy: How We Drifted Close to War," Saturday Evening Post, December 13, 1958, pp. 26-27, 86-88; memorandum of conversation, Yu Ta-wei, Walter Robertson and others, December 6, 1955, Office of Chinese Affairs, 1948-56, Box 53, Offshore Islands, 1955, RG 59, National Archives.
7. John Foster Dulles, "Preliminary draft of possible statement of position for communication to the Republic of China," April 4, 1955, Office...
Several criticisms are offered of statements made in the series of ; articles on thermonuclear war. The statement that human bodies would be ; particularly hazardous missiles seems erroneous in that their maximum ; translational velocity 15 miles from ground zero would not be over 24 ft/sec. ; Glass fragments at this 15-mile radius could attain, however, a velocity of 170 ; ft/sec, which puts them in the highly dangerous classification. The statement ; was made that persons subjected to overpressures of 20 to 50 psi are more likely ; to be killed by secondary or tertiary effects. Twenty psi overpressure from a ; 20megaton weapon would be generated at a radius of 4.8 miles from ground zero, ; and would arrive in approximates 14 sec. During the period before 14 sec., 60% ; of the total thermal pulse would have been delivered. At this radius the thermal ; dose from the entire pulse would be approximates 700 cal/cm²; since only ; 10 cal is sufficient to produce a severe second-degree burn, and since some 420 ; cal/cm² would have been incident upon any human beings in direct line of ; sight from the weapon before the onset of blast, it hardly seems necessary to ; consider secondary or tertiary effects. A further statement that flying glass ; and masonry would travel at the speed of sound is unacceptable, since the order ; of magnitude of translational speeds of glass fragments is known to be far less ; than Mach 1. A statement that the major thermal puise of this type of weapon is ; an infrared pulse, containing nearly 35% of the bomb's energy is incorrect in ; that the majority of the thermal output is in the visible range. The statement ; that an air burst would produce little or no local fallout is also incorrect if ; one assumes weapons of megaton size, since the fireball radius is so large that ; the earth's surface would become involved in it. (H.H.D.);
In selecting these historical documents the authors have applied three general tests: first, does the document help tell the story of the development of American nuclear policy in a nontechnical way; second, is the source primary rather than secondary, written by an actor in the drama rather than by a member of the audience; third, does the document provide coverage of the major chapters in the story. The Manhattan Project was America's $2 billion secret project to build an atomic bomb. Many documents associated with the project have come to light only in recent years. In Section II they use the letters of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the recently declassified minutes of policy committees to tell the story of how the bomb was designed and built and how the decision was made to drop the first uranium and plutonium devices on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. How did a weapon of war become the key to a peacetime industry. In considering atomic energy after World War II, they focus in Section III on the legislative enabling acts that established the Atomic Energy Commission, the short-lived dream of international control of nuclear weapons under the Baruch Plan, and the ''atoms for peace'' program of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. By 1954 the highly classified work on nuclear weapons paralleled a new development of nuclear energy and power reactors. Knowledge was shared with both private industry and other countries. The fruits of this program are considered in the later section on nuclear power.
This is not a new plan for arms control but an inquiry as to whether democratic institutions can cope with the major problems of public policy today. Robert Dahl points out that decisions on nuclear weapons (or disposal of nuclear waste, reactor safety or industrial pollution, to cite a few examples) are too complex and technical for the average citizen; yet if they are turned over to an elite of experts or ''wise men'' or guardians, there is no guarantee that those men will have the moral and other qualities needed to serve the public good-delegated power in these circumstances tends to become alienated power. Dahl has a partial answer: make use of the new communications technology to raise level of public knowledge and understanding.
In this book, Robert McNamara has made a chart of the nuclear age, laying bare the elaborate mythology that has enabled Americans to demonize the Soviet people and the Soviet military establishment. The former defense secretary emphasizes that the position in which the United States now finds itself - as hostage to its own nuclear policy - evolved from piecemeal decision-making rather than by careful plan. The strategy for the defense of the United States and of Western Europe rests on a single mistaken premise, says McNamara, that nuclear weapons can be used for traditional military purposes - that is, to secure victory against an enemy. McNamara somewhat sadly dismisses Gorbachev's proposal to eliminate all nuclear weapons as infeasible because of the possibility of cheating, and because crisis stability would be better served by a minimal deterrent.
Robert 1998 India Bomb Hits Chord for Hindus
- Marquand
Marquand, Robert 1998 India Bomb Hits Chord for Hindus. Christian Science Monitor, June 4:1.
Address to San Francisco Commonwealth Club. KQED-Radio
- Kenneth Adelman
Adelman, Kenneth
1988 Address to San Francisco Commonwealth Club. KQED-Radio, June 9.
Robert 1998 Pakistan's Catch-22
- Mcfarlane
McFarlane, Robert 1998 Pakistan's Catch-22. New York Times, May 30:13.
Remembering Hiroshima at a Nuclear Weapons Laboratory. In Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age
- Gusterson
- Hugh
Gusterson, Hugh 1996 Nuclear Rites: A Nuclear Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1997 Remembering Hiroshima at a Nuclear Weapons Laboratory. In Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age. Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds. Pp. 260-276. New York: M. E. Sharpe. Haraway, Donna 1990 Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge.
Carolyn 1980 The Death of Nature
- Merchant
Merchant, Carolyn 1980 The Death of Nature. San Francisco: Harper.
Lapidus for pointing this out to me
- George Bunn
I thank George Bunn and Gail Lapidus for pointing this out to me.
Pakistan Told to Put Weapons Away
- Marshall
- Tyler
- India
Marshall, Tyler 1998a India, Pakistan Told to Put Weapons Away. San Francisco Chronicle, May 28:5. 1998b South Asia Testing May Blast a Hole in 3-Decade Old Double Standard. Los Angeles Times, June 5.A12.