Nuclear Weapons And Warfare After The Cold War

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND WARFARE AFTER THE COLD WAR The story so far: $

The ‘core’ of the Cold War system became increasingly set in stone, although within the ‘superpower condominium’ the arms race continued.

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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.

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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.

THREE DEVELOPMENTS 1.

Nuclear arms control comes back into fashion

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The ‘baroque arsenal’ is increasingly seen as unthinkable; scenarios of ‘nuclear winter’, etc., in the 1980s The INF Treaty sets the scene not only for nuclear arms agreements but also conventional arms control However, attempts to develop detailed new agreements on banning testing and on non-proliferation bump up against both old and new constraints The Clinton Administration and defence policy — rethinking or drift? Two types of potential proliferation: (a) smaller powers (India, Pakistan, etc.)?; (b) non-state actors (incl. terrorists)?

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2.

High-tech AND low-tech warfare: the so-called ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’

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The Gulf War and precision weaponry The ‘flexibilisation’ of war from low-tech to high-tech — graduated deterrence in conventional warfare? The United States and the dilemma of coalition-building: hegemony and unilateralism Back to the future: the NMD Europe: ‘military pygmy’ (Lord George Robertson)? Other big-gish powers? Japan? Canada? Australia? etc.

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These developments are still in the melting pot: power being reconfigured as we speak

3. The real sources of warfare and violence today: globalisation, nonstate actors and the ‘new security dilemma’

What is the NSD? The traditional security dilemma and the new security dilemma Underlying factors/wider trends: $ economic globalisation $ the ‘death of ideology’ $ multiculturalism and postmodernism $ transnational governance Civil wars, ethnic wars, cross-border wars, terrorism, etc. Towards a new medievalism in international politics? Not merely ‘multipolarity’, but a potentially unstable combination of centripetal and centrifugal forces struggling over the periphery $

unipolarity and fragmentation