Nuclear Weapons And The Cold War

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND THE COLD WAR The story so far: There have been three major phases in the development of modern warfare: 1. 2. 3.

Industrialised warfare Nuclear war (or non-war)/Cold War High-tech war

— From reality to abstraction? Today we look mainly at (2), or how nuclear war and the Cold War developed in tandem. Three phases WITHIN the Cold War I. II. III.

From American preponderance to Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) Stalemate and Detente The Second Cold War and Nuclear War-fighting **********

I.

From American preponderance to Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)

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What is MAD? At the end of the Second World War — from nuclear monopoly to arms race The Soviet Union begins to catch up — at what threshold does the ability to USE nuclear weapons diminish? Rollback or containment? US defence policy from NSC 68 to mid-1950s: ‘more bang for a buck’ The ‘Third World’ and the Cold War in the 1950s The beginnings of proliferation and the British bomb The Berlin Wall and stalemate France, the bomb and NATO Suez, Hungary and the beginnings of superpower condominium The Sino-Soviet split — does China want the bomb? The end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s — from ‘We will bury you’ (Nikita Khrushchev) to disarmament negotiations; the space race; the ‘missile gap’ and American politics

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‘Deterrence’ and the uneven institutionalisation of the nuclear balance of power $

From stalemate to thaw?

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Smaller nuclear powers, MAD and uncertainty ‘Unthinkable’ — nuclear weapons only valuable if NEVER USED (but still an arms race!) Guns or butter? Economic growth and the defence debate

II. The Cuban missile crisis (1962) and the institutionalisation of the ‘superpower condominium’ $ $ $ $ $ $

‘13 Days’ — from reality to movie! The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Non-Proliferation Treaty France, the bomb and NATO BUT — cracks in the fabric: limited war and the Third World (Latin America, Vietnam, Africa, etc.) Nixon, Brezhnev and the formalisation of detente: the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks/Treaty, US-China links, etc. But — continued domestic crises, the impact of political economy (recession, the Oil Crisis, debt crises, etc.), Third World Confrontation (Cuba, Mid-East, Africa, Afghanistan) and the erosion of SALT

III. The Second Cold War and Nuclear Weapons $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $

The concept of graduated deterrence or flexible response — life (or death!) after MAD? SALT II, MIRVs, etc. The apparent failure of the Carter Administration to balance detente and confrontation The election of Ronald Reagan and the ‘window of vulnerability’ From ‘flexible response’ to the doctrine of ‘nuclear war-fighting’; the lengthening ‘ladder of escalation’; towards a ‘baroque arsenal’? (Mary Kaldor) Star Wars Reagan, Gorbachev and the great volte-face of the mid-1980s Globalisation and interdependence — towards ‘imperial overstretch’? The end of the Cold War — what role for nuclear weapons in a period of the decentralisation and fragmentation of warfare? *************

The story updated: The ‘core’ of the Cold War system became increasingly set in stone, although within the ‘superpower condominium’ the arms race continued. But that core became more and more irrelevant as the ‘periphery’, including the Third World but also to some extent Europe, became more fluid and fragmented and less controllable from the centre.

Thus the Cold War became a tug-of-war between centripetal and centrifugal forces, with the core becoming increasingly irrelevant to the day-to-day agenda of international politics and the periphery increasingly dominating that agenda.