Nuclearweapons and Strategy

Why the Wizards of Armageddon Ran Into An Intellectual Dead-end:
And What That Tells Us About the Relevance of Academic Nuclear Strategy Today
Paul C. Avey
Southern Methodist University
and
Michael C. Desch
University of Notre Dame
[Fourth Draft December 2014]
I. Introduction.
International security has long been among the most policy relevant of sub-fields in field of
academic international relations. 1 This is still the case today, at least as measured by the relative
willingness of authors in top international relations journals to offer explicit policy recommendations.
There is a significant difference in this regard, as Figure 1 shows, between articles since 1980 dealing
with security issues (i.e., weapons of mass destruction, weapons acquisition, terrorism, and military
intervention) and other issue areas in the field.2
But as Figure 2 shows, the willingness of leading international relations scholars to offer such
policy recommendations has declined in absolute terms since 1980 and this drop may have something
to do with the professionalization of the discipline of political science. While the professionalization of a
discipline, and its increasing irrelevance to concrete policy issues, is neither historically nor logically
inevitable, there nonetheless seems to be an elective affinity between these two trends. First, the
increasing emphasis on quantitative research has led to narrower research questions which are often
too abstruse or obscure to be relevant to policy. Second, many proponents of the scientific study of
politics believe that advocacy of particular policies is incompatible with scientific objectivity and so avoid
1
Robert Jervis, Security Studies: Ideas, Policy, and Politics and Thomas Schelling, Academics, Decision Makers,
and Security Policy During the Cold War: A Comment on Jervis both in Edward D. Mansfield and Richard Sisson,
eds. The Evolution of Political Knowledge (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 101 and 137. Also
see, Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 336.
2
The Teaching and Research in International Politics journal coding project is described in Daniel Maliniak, Amy
Oakes, Susan Peterson, and Michael J. Tierney, International Relations in the Academy, International Studies
Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 2 (2011)): 437-64. The data from which I generated these figures is available at
http://www3.nd.edu/~carnrank/.
1
it. Third, many pressing policy questions are not readily amenable to the preferred methodological
tools of social scientists. Finally, even when the results of these approaches are relevant to policy
questions, they are often not presented in an accessible way for policymakers or the broader public.3
The more scientific approaches to international relations scholarship seem to be the least relevant, at
least as measured by their practitioners willingness to offer policy recommendations, as Figure 3
indicates. The problem, in our view, is not so much that scientific approaches to national security
policy are irrelevant by definition; rather, their current dominance is a symptom of a larger trend among
the social sciences to privilege method over substance, which Figure 3 suggests, with a resulting decline
in policy relevance.
3
For further elaboration, see Michael C. Desch, Technique Trumps Relevance: The Professionalization of Political
Science and the Marginalization of Security Studies, Perspectives on Politics Vol. 13, No. 1 (March 2015):
[forthcoming].
2
Figure 1: Articles With Policy Prescriptions by Subfield
3
Quantitative Methods and Policy Prescriptions
in Top IR Journals since 1980
60
Proportion (%) 50
40
30
Quantitative
20
Policy Prescription
10
0
1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012
Year
Figure 2: The Growth in the Number of Quantitative Articles and Those Providing Policy Prescriptions (1980-2012)
Methodologies and Policy Prescriptions in

Top IR Journals (1980-2012)
90
80
Proportion (%)
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Methodologies
Figure 3 Methodologies That Offer Policy Prescriptions in IR Journals
Since many believe it was nuclear strategy that first opened the door for the Cold War Wizards
of Armageddon to shape nuclear strategy, and remains among the most relevant today, we believe that
this issue area is a good one to explore when and under what conditions academic international
4
relations influences policy. Academic strategists4 such as Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, Herman
Kahn, William Kaufman, and especially Thomas Schelling reputedly exercised such influence that the
period between 1945 and 1961 is regarded as the Golden Age of academic national security studies.5
For example, Brodie himself avers that it is no exaggeration to say that all the distinctively modern
concepts of military strategy, most of which have been embraced by the military services themselves,
have evolved out of [the] ranks [of the scientific strategists].6 Former RAND staffer Roman Kolkowicz
claims that the deterrence paradigm, developed by the defense intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s,
provided the central concept for the management of nuclear strategy.7 Even then-Air Force Chief of
Staff General Thomas White, a skeptic of civilian defense intellectuals in general, conceded that some of
them knew more about some nuclear policy issues than he did.8
Many scholars agree. All the fundamental ideas about nuclear strategy came from civilians, in
Robert Jervis view.9 Retired Army General and former University of Pittsburgh Provost Wesley Posvar
cautions that the impact of this work [by academic strategists] is so great that any serious new study
which treats of the present military situation in international politics, including the whole fields of
deterrence and arms control, must take account of it.10 Journalist Fred Kaplan was so impressed with
their influence that he was inspired to use a theological metaphor to describe it: the ideas of these
thermonuclear Jesuits would have so thoroughly percolated through the corridors of power and
through their annexes in academia that, at least among fellow members of the congregation, their
wisdom would be taken almost for granted, their assumptions worshipped as gospel, their insight
elevated to an almost mystical level and accepted as dogma. [T]his small group of theorists would
4
This is Joseph Krafts phrase in The War Thinkers, Esquire, Vol. 58, No. ? (1962) 103.
5
Thomas Schelling, Bernard Brodie (1910-1978), International Security Vol. 3, No. 3 (Winter 1978-1979): 2.
6
Bernard Brodie, The American Scientific Strategists, RAND Paper [P-2979] (Santa Monica, CA: RAND
Corporation, October 1964), 2.
7
Roman Kolkowicz, The Strange Career of the Defense Intellectuals, Orbis Vol. 31, No. 2 (Summer 1987): 187.
8
Kraft, The War Thinkers, 103.
9
Jervis, Security Studies: Ideas, Policy, and Politics, 109.
10
Wesley W. Posvar, The Impact of Strategy Expertise on the National Security Policy of the United States, Public
Policy Vol. 13, No. 13 (1964): 51.
5
devise and help implement a set of ideas that would change the shape of American defense policy11
Even root-and-branch critics of American academic strategists such as P.M.S. Blackett ruefully admitted
that their writings had a rather big influence.12
To be sure, not everyone is convinced that there really was such a Golden Age in which social
science actually influenced U.S. national security policy. Pointing to the divergence between U.S. nuclear
declaratory policy (in which defense intellectuals apparently had influence through the theory of Mutual
Assured Destruction [MAD]) and actual operational doctrine and war plans (where in his view they did
not), historian Bruce Kuklick presents the most sustained critique of the conventional wisdom.
According to his account, the men who actually made decisions were least concerned with scientific
ideas of any sort and he concludes that the ideas of strategists had little causal impact, save perhaps
as ex post facto rationalizations for policymakers decisions. In his view, none of the critical aspects of
decision making had much to do with the prevalent model of American social science whispering in
the ear of princes the middle-range generalizations supposedly necessary to benign policy and
learned in a Ph.D. course.13 Deborah Larson agrees that even the dean of civilian nuclear strategists
Bernard Brodie actually had little impact on the government or the wider public.14
This debate about the extent of the influence of academic social scientists on nuclear strategy
matters for several reasons. First, if civilian academic strategists had no influence on nuclear thinking
during the early Cold War, there is little reason to expect them to have any today. Second, if there is no
variation in their influence then this case would not be helpful in drawing conclusions about when and
11
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 11. Also see 32, where Kaplan points out that this trend began already
during the Second World War.
12
P.M.S. Blackett, Critique of Some Contemporary Defence Thinking, Encounter Vol. 16, No. 4 (April 1961):14.
13
Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006), 6, 15-16, 143-44, 150, 223-30. Also see, Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in
Americas Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 4 and Fred Kaplan, Strategic Thinkers, Bulletin
of Atomic Scientists Vol. 38. No. 10 (December 1982): 51-56.
14
Deborah Welch Larson, Deterrence Theory and the Cold War Radical History Review Vol. 63 (1995): 88-89.
6
under what conditions they might have it.15 Finally, it speaks to the larger question, in the words of a
National Research Council study, whether there is any relationship between basic [social science]
research and programmatically useful results.16 Or to quote Aaron Wildavsky, the real question is
whether disciplined intuition (meaning theorizing) has something to offer the untutored kind.17
To answer this question, we will explore the changing relationship between academia and the
national security policy during the so-called Golden Age of cooperation between the two realms from
roughly 1945 through 1965, focusing particularly on the issue of nuclear strategy. We aim to establish
the academic strategists actual influence (the value of dependent variable) as well as to explain their
changing role in nuclear strategy (identifying the independent variable). Using this history we develop
criteria for when scholarship can influence policy. We further demonstrate the plausibility of this
framework by utilizing it to explain why the first post-Cold War wave of nuclear studies failed to
influence policy.18 We then employ these criteria to determine when and how the current generation of
academics working on nuclear issues might influence policy much as political scientist Robert Gilpin did
for the role of natural scientists in U.S. nuclear weapons policy.19
Briefly, we agree with Jervis that the Golden Age theorists influence may be greater than
Kuklick portrays,20 but show that it waxed and then waned during the Cold War. It did so even before
the Vietnam War, eventually reaching an intellectual dead-end. By this, we mean that intellectual
15
See Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative
Research. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 129 on the importance of selecting cases with variation
in the dependent variable.
16
Advisory Committee on the Management of Behavioral Science Research in the Department of Defense, Division
of Behavioral Sciences, National Research Council, Behavioral and Social Research in the Department of Defense: A
Framework for Management (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1971), xii.
17
Aaron Wildavsky, Practical Consequences of the Theoretical Study of Defense Policy, Public Administration
Review Vol. 25, No. 1 (March 1965): 93. Also see Robert Packenham, Social Science and Public Policy in Sidney
Verba, and Lucian W. Pye, eds., The Citizen and Politics: A Comparative Perspective. (Stamford, CT: Greylock
Publishers, 1978), 237-57.
18
In a sense we are testing the theory against new data, see King et al., Designing Social Inquiry, 21-23, 30, 46.
19
Robert Gilpin, American Scientists & Nuclear Weapons Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 300.
Also see, 7.
20
Robert Jervis, Commentary, H-Diplo Roundtable Blind Oracles, 9 at http://www.h-
net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Jervis-KuklickRoundtable.pdf.
7
developments within the academy the privileging of theory and method over substantive relevance
reduced the relevance of the work of many academic defense intellectuals. What led to that, we
suggest, was their growing embrace of Economic approaches to nuclear strategy. We are not arguing
that sophisticated social scientific methods are necessarily incompatible with policy relevant
scholarship; rather, just that when they are employed without attention to their appropriateness for the
concrete question at hand, and pursued for internal disciplinary reasons such a theoretical elegance or
congruence with our preferred image of what a science should be, they are not very helpful to
policymakers. The increasingly abstract character of late Golden Age theories would eventually
disconnect them altogether from real-world policy concerns by pushing nuclear strategy beyond MAD.
The end of the Golden Age is thus a cautionary tale for todays generation of nuclear scholars, many of
whom in their effort to recreate a science of strategy seem once again to be emulating the methods
and approaches of Economics that brought academic nuclear strategy to a dead-end. 21
This paper proceeds in three sections: We begin by tracing and then explaining the waxing and
waning of the Golden Age of academic nuclear strategy to develop criteria for influence. Next we apply
these insights to post-Cold War nuclear theorizing including the optimist-pessimist debate and the
purported renaissance in nuclear studies. We conclude with some recommendations for how to
balance rigor with relevance so that the current wave of academic nuclear theorizing can avoid ending
up once again in an intellectual cul-de-sac.
II. The Waxing and Waning of the Golden Age of Academic Nuclear Strategists
Given that there is some debate about the actual influence of the Golden Age civilian nuclear
strategists, our first task is to establish whether they in fact had any. Having established that they did, at
least early on, we need to consider two explanations for the waning of their influence. The conventional
21
This reflects larger disciplinary trend in political science. See, for example, Albert O. Hirshman, Exit, Voice, and
Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 19. Also
see, Gordon Tullock, Economic Imperialism in James M. Buchanan, ed., Theory of Public Choice: Political
Applications of Economics (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 325.
8
wisdom is that it ended as a result of the political turmoil of the Vietnam War which delegitimized
collaboration with the U.S. Government among academics. While there is some truth in that view, we
suggest that it was the increasing influence of Economic approaches to strategy that further undermined
the relevance of academic strategy by privileging internal disciplinary concerns like theoretical
eloquence and the use of sophisticated methods over addressing concrete policy problems.
The Influence of Academic Nuclear Strategists During The Early Cold War
Ascertaining whether academic nuclear strategists had influence will be challenging for two
reasons: As political scientist John Kingdon warns, the influence of academics upon policy debates is
often hidden and the secrecy surrounding national security decision-making makes their role in
nuclear strategy even more opaque. 22 Moreover, such an exercise partakes of the more general
challenge of tracing the influence of ideas the currency of academics upon policy outcomes.23 Given
that, our expectations for what sort of influence they could have need to be reasonable. As Bruce
Smith notes, the end product of most planning and research activities is not an agenda of mechanical
policy moves for every contingency plainly an impossible task but rather a more sophisticated map
of reality carried in the minds of the policy makers.24 Therefore, we need to look more closely at the
history of the Golden Age, which we believe shows that some of these ideas about the effects of nuclear
weapons upon statecraft particularly the Nuclear Revolution and MAD did have real impact on
Presidential crisis decision-making at certain junctures even if they did not shape operational plans and
doctrine.
22
John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies [Second ed.] (New York: Longman, 2003), 199.
23
Peter A. Hall, Introduction in Hall, ed., The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3-4. Also see Jeffrey W. Legro, The Transformation of Policy
Ideas, American Journal of Political Science Vol. 44, No. 3 (July 2000): 419-32; Emanuel Adler and Peter M. Hass,
Conclusion: Epistemic Communities, World Order, and the Creation of a Reflective Research Program,
International Organization Vol. 46, No. 1 (Winter 1992): 367-90; and especially Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and
Public Policies, 2-3.
24
Bruce L.R. Smith, The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1966), 230.
9
Two related events at the end of the Second World War set the stage for the longest peacetime
period of national security policy cooperation between the academy and the U.S. Government. These
were the invention and use of the Atomic Bomb against Japan in the last weeks of the war and then the
outbreak of the Cold War two years later. Not surprisingly given Yale Universitys role during the
Second World War, the locus for thinking about the implications of the nuclear revolution was at its
Institute for International Studies.25 It was there that political scientist Bernard Brodie first argued that
the development of these weapons would fundamentally change the nature of international relations.26
For much of history, in Brodies view, military force had been a viable instrument of statecraft.
But with the advent of nuclear weapons, only the threat of the use of force remained available to
statesmen because the actual use of nuclear weapons would be mutually catastrophic.27 Brodie foresaw
that the development of the H-bomb would tilt the cost/benefit ratio against war permanently:28
Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief
purpose must be to avert them. It can have no other useful purpose.29 It was actually Brodies mentor
University of Chicago economist Jacob Viner who drew the logical implication of his students argument
that nuclear weapons were only useful for deterrence.30 All these ideas crystalized in a volume of essays
Brodie edited for IIS entitled The Absolute Weapon which established the contributors as the countrys
25 nd
Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 [2 ed.] (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1996) and Frederick S. Dunn, The Growth of the Yale Institute of International Studies,
November 7, 1950 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/ccfe7e7718d3606ab50c8cdd2d88c37b.pdf.
26
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 10.
27
See the discussion of Brodies influence in Herken, Counsels of War, xi-xii.
28
Barry H. Steiner, Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy (Lawrence, KS: The University
Press of Kansas, 1991), 134.
29
Frederick S. Dunn, Bernard Brodie, Arnold Wolfers, Percy E. Corbett, and William T.R. Fox, The Absolute
Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946), 76.
30
The essay was Jacob Viner, The Implications of the Atomic Bomb for International Relations in International
Economics (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1946), 300- 9. Also see Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 27; and
Albert Wohlstetter, Letter to Michael Howard, On the Genesis of Nuclear Strategy, 1968, in Robert Zarate
Henry Sokolski, eds., NUCLEAR HEURISTICS: SELECTED WRITINGS OF ALBERT And ROBERTA WOHLSTETTER
(Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, January 2009), 227 at
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB893.pdf .
10
leading experts on nuclear strategy, their services much in demand in government and the military.31
With that, the institution of the civilian defense intellectual was established.
Because they were so revolutionary, nuclear weapons would not remain the exclusive purview
of the uniformed military. After all, it was natural scientists, many with academic affiliations, who had
invented the bomb in the first place, and so it was not surprising that it would be academic social
scientists, some of whom remained in the academy and some of whom migrated to intellectual half-way
houses like the new RAND Corporation, who played the key role in clarifying their effects upon
statecraft.32 Civilians could claim expertise in the nuclear realm because, as RAND economist and later
Department of Defense Comptroller Alain Enthoven told one Air Force General, I have fought just as
many nuclear wars as you have.33 Brodie added a second rationale: In a world of MAD, only pre-war
political decisions really mattered, which were squarely in the realm of civilian expertise.34
In addition to Yale, there were social scientists at other universities whom policymakers
consulted on nuclear strategy. The staff of the Weapon System Evaluation Group, for example, an
organization established in 1948 to advise the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the
various technical aspects of weapons systems, reached out to M.I.T. professor Max Millikan and a group
of eight other social scientists to solicit their views on how many casualties the United States would
have to inflict in order to break the Soviets will to continue to wage war. Not surprisingly, they
concluded that there presently exists no basis on which to assess quantitatively the effects on the
Soviet will to continue to fight.35 Brodie himself served directly as an advisor to USAF Chief of Staff
31
Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 11.
32
As Gilpin, American Scientists & Nuclear Weapons Policy, 112-21 shows, in the late 1940s and early 1950s,
academic physical scientists at MIT and Cal-Tech continued to address strategic issues through various projects
such as Hartwell (undersea warfare), Charles (continental air defense), Lincoln (radar), Summer Lincoln
(active air defense), East River (passive air defense), and most importantly Vista (diversification of delivery
systems for Americas nuclear weapons systems).
33
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 254. Also see Kraft, The War Thinkers, 103.
34
Brodie, The American Scientific Strategists, 13.
35
David Alan Rosenberg, A Smoking Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours: Documents on American Plans for
Nuclear War With the Soviet Union, 1954-55, International Security, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Winter 1981/1982): 31.
11
General Hoyt Vandenberg from December 1950 throughout 1951 helping the Air Force select Soviet
targets.36 He was, in fact, the first civilian to review the U.S. emergency war plan.37
All was not sweetness and light in the groves of post-World War II academe, however. As
Herken argues, there was an early tension between the scientists at RAND and their counterparts at
colleges and universities, which he attributes to the political differences between the two groups.38
Dissension among the defense intellectuals themselves also undercut their influence on nuclear
strategy. Brodie was slated to conduct a major study of nuclear targeting for Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt
Vandenberg but was abruptly terminated before it was completed after Edward Earl Meade black-
balled him with Secretary of the Air Force Thomas Finletter.39
But it was the intellectual tensions between scholarly rigor and policy relevance which were the
major obstacle to sustained cooperation. For example, the winds at Yale changed dramatically when
President Seymour was replaced by A. Whitney Griswold, who disapproved of the defense research IIS
was doing and closed it down. The core philosophy of the Institutes work was, in Dunns words, the
development of a more disciplined type of policy analysis. 40 However, this approach still cut against
the grain of both the traditional scholarly approach to research (the Institute sponsored a lot of team
projects as opposed to supporting the work of individual scholars) and it paid scant attention to
traditional academic disciplinary boundaries. It was not just Griswold who had reservations about IIS;
Yales political science department also launched a campaign to de-emphasize international relations in
36
Steiner, Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy, 20.
37
Steiner, Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy, 107 and 111.
38
Herken, Counsels of War, 75.
39
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 49, note, lays out the compelling circumstantial case. Also see, Herken,
Counsels of War, 32.
40
Frederick S. Dunn, The Growth of the Yale Institute of International Relations, November 7, 1950 at
http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/ccfe7e7718d3606ab50c8cdd2d88c37b.pdf. 8.
12
favor of domestic political science.41 By 1954, Yale had lost six of the core IIS members and its main
activities policy research and World Politics to other institutions.42
As a result of more wide-spread lack of enthusiasm among universities for doing policy-relevant
national security research, interest grew in finding an alternative way to marshal academic resources for
the Cold War.43 The key proponent was Air Force General Henry Hap Arnold, whose experience
working with physical scientists at MIT during the war on projects such as radar convinced him that the
government ought to find a way to institutionalize this cooperation after the war.44 In September of
1945 Arnold convened a meeting at Henderson Field in California with, among others, the head of
Douglass Aircraft Corporation, and announced a $30 million contract for Project RAND.45
As journalist Joseph Kraft put it, a main part of [RANDs] job was to bridge the ancient gulf
between scholars and soldiers.46 It was in many respects the ideal intellectual environment: It was
interdisciplinary, it attracted some of the brightest minds in the national security field, it gave staff
access to classified information without imposing military discipline, and, best of all, there were no
teaching obligations. While RAND was not the first think tank by any means, its success in the national
security realm in the early Cold War led to their proliferation in number and growth in influence.47 This
new Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDC) initial focus was on the natural
science, technology side of civilian defense work, but quickly came to include a large number of social
scientists as well.
41
Roger F. Evans, Interview with David N. Rowe regarding international relations vs. political science, October 2,
1951 at http://rockefeller100.org/archive/files/8679dfe2866bb4a1c589b1de63291b67.pdf.
42
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 49-50; Kuklick, Blind Oracles, 87;
43
Gene M. Lyons and Louis Morton, Schools for Strategy: Education and Research in National Security Affairs (New
York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 130-34.
44
Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (Orland, FL:
Harcourt, 2008), 10.
45
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 52-58. Also see Kuklick, Blind Oracles, 22-23.
46
Joseph Kraft, RAND: Arsenal for Ideas, Harpers Magazine, Vol. 221, No. 1322 (July 1960): 69.
47
David Hounshell, The Cold War, RAND, and the Generation of Knowledge, 1946-1962, RAND History Project
[RP-729] (Santa Monica: RAND, 1998), 240.
13
The founder of RANDs social science division was a former student of Viners at the University
of Chicago, a polymath by the name of Leo Rosten. In addition to writing Hollywood screen-plays and
books on Yiddish, Rosten had an advanced degree from the London School of Economics and earned a
fellowship from the Social Science Research Council before serving in the Office of War Information
during the Second World War. He was charged with recruiting top-notch academic talent to work at
RAND.48 RAND social scientists made a number of contributions to policymaking spanning the gamut
from softer social science analyses a good example here is Nathan Leites seminal work on Soviet
strategic culture and the operational code of the Bolshevik leadership, which reportedly influenced
Paul Nitzes thinking in drafting National Security Council Memorandum 68 to much harder social
science approaches that embraced the cutting edge methodologies of Mathematics and Economics and
applied them to defense problems.49
Perhaps RANDs most important national security research involved how the United States
ought to think about nuclear strategy once the Soviet Union developed its own nuclear capability. While
a number of RAND analysts studied this issue, the most influential was Albert Wohlstetter, later a
professor of political science at the University of Chicago.50 A trained mathematician, Wohlstetter was,
like Rosten, a man of broad interests, ranging from business to the philosophy of science. During the
Second World War, Wohlstetter served in diverse branches of the U.S. Government from the War
Production Board to the National Housing Agency. Wohlstetters first project for RAND was his famous
basing study which explored how the Strategic Air Commands dependence upon a small number of
air bases might make it vulnerable to a Soviet first strike, thus eliminating a large part of the United
States nuclear arsenal. While he struggled to get SAC to concede this vulnerability, Kaplan concludes
that in the end Wohlstetters study finally led SAC to reduce its dependency on elaborate overseas
48
49
On Leites, see Kuklick, Blind Oracles, 32-2.
50
Kuklick, Blind Oracles, 63.
14
bases . There is no question that the Wohlstetter study helped reduce this reliance.51 Smith
corroborates that the basing study eventually lead to Air Force policy shifts after an Air Staff committee
signed off on its recommendations.52
Wohlstetters second contribution to U.S. nuclear strategy was the research that led up to his
famous January 1959 Foreign Affairs article The Delicate Balance of Terror, in which he argued that
the United States could not depend upon the continuing invulnerability of its nuclear deterrent.53
Wohlstetters analysis of the vulnerability of U.S. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles overcame Air Force
skepticism that hardening them in concrete silos would serve to mitigate their vulnerability.54 It not
only bolstered Democratic critics of the Eisenhower strategy of Massive Retaliation, but the general
RAND approach to defense analysis (quantitative data analyzed using sophisticated methods such as
operations research or systems analysis), which Wohlstetter epitomized, also raised the bar for strategic
analysis both inside and outside of the U.S. Government.55
While a number of academics including Henry Kissinger and Robert Osgood were skeptical of
the Eisenhower Administrations policy of Massive Retaliation, the most trenchant critic of the
strategy of relying solely on nuclear weapons to defer a conventional Soviet attack was Princeton
University political scientist William Kaufmann. 56 Like Rosten and Wohlstetter, Kaufmann had an
eclectic background that included Yale, Wall Street, and war-time service in the U.S. Army. His Princeton
Center for International Studies report The Requirements of Deterrence landed the critical blow in
the public debate about whether to rely exclusively upon the threat of nuclear retaliation to deter a
51
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 110. Also see Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, 19 who concludes that
Wohlstetters conclusions were enormously influential; and Morton H. Halperin, The Gaither Committee and
the Policy Process, World Politics, Vol. 13, No. 3 (April 1961): 366, fn. 21, which argues that the committees
proposals on strategic vulnerability were heavily influenced by a classified RAND report prepared under the
direction of Albert Wohlstetter.
52
Smith, The RAND Corporation, 233.
53
Albert Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance of Terror, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 37, No. ? (1959): 211-234. Also see,
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 108-10.
54
55
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 171-73; Herken, Counsels of War, 124.
56
Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martins, 1983), 100-02.
15
Soviet conventional attack upon Western Europe. 57 It attracted the attention of Hans Speir, the new
head of the RAND social science division, for whom Kaufmann began doing summer consulting. His
recommendation that the United States engage in a build-up of its conventional forces not only
appealed to the bureaucratic interest of the U.S. Army but also became a major plank in Kennedys
campaign platform.58
In addition to renewed attention to conventional forces, the other result of Kaufmanns work
was to spur interest in the use of strategic nuclear forces to limit damage from the Soviets nuclear
arsenal. Counter force was a response not only to the growing problem of the credibility of the United
States extended deterrent in Europe, but it also represented a possible means for limiting damage and
avoiding bloody counter value exchanges against cities and population centers.59 Kaufmanns work
was influential not only among defense intellectuals, but also in the U.S. Air Force, where it was viewed
as a potent bureaucratic weapon in its war against the U.S. Navy, whose Submarine Launched Ballistic
Missiles were not yet accurate enough to conduct such strikes.60 The peak of his influence would come
when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara would announce his no cities doctrine in two speeches
in Athens, Greece and Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1962.61
While the Eisenhower Administration had, ironically given his dislike of civilian strategists,
started the trend of relying upon outside experts in strategic affairs, the high water-mark for the
influence of academic defense intellectuals was the Kennedy Administration.62 Throughout the 1950s a
group of Harvard and MIT faculty played an increasingly public role in the debate about U.S. defense
57
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 186-89.
58
59
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 201-19; Kuklick, Blind Oracles, 107-8.
60
61
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 283-85; Herken, Counsels of War, 79 and 151; Deborah Shapley, Promise
and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 139-40 and 193.
62
Herken, Counsels of War, 133. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 27 notes that it was Senator Adlai
Stevenson who first brought egg heads into the Democratic Party. Kuklick, Blind Oracles, 49-54 and 65 highlights
Eisenhowers lack of faith in social scientists but his great regard for natural scientists.
16
policy, including as members of the academic advisory group during the 1960 presidential campaign.63 It
members were a veritable whos who of academic luminaries, including Kissinger, John Kenneth
Galbraith, Carl Kaysen, Paul Samuelson, Richard Nuestadt, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. A young Harvard
graduate student by the name of Daniel Ellsberg, who was working at RAND while finishing his Ph.D.,
served as a back channel to the campaign for staffers there like Wohlstetter, Enthoven, Harry Rowen,
and Fred Hoffman.64
Kennedy drew liberally upon universities and other repositories of the best and the brightest
throughout his administration, but the appointment of Ford Motor Company President (and former
Harvard Business School professor) Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense opened wide the
Pentagon doors to civilian defense intellectuals from RAND and academia. The social scientists whom
McNamara recruited to the Pentagon were collectively referred to as the Whiz Kids in recognition not
only of their brilliance, but also their youth. These young analysts included people like Kaufmann, who
had left RAND and was then teaching at MIT; Enthoven; the Harvard economist Thomas Schelling; and
former Oxford don Charles Hitch, then the director of the Economics division at RAND.65
The infusion of these brash, young intellectuals was not universally welcomed among the
military. The Air Force had chaffed at Brodies meddling in war planning in the early 1950s but the Whiz
Kids presented a much greater threat given their numbers and support from the Secretary of Defense.66
Former Air Force Chief of Staff General Thomas White confessed that in common with many other
military men, active and retired, I am profoundly apprehensive of the pipe-smoking, tree-full-of-owls
type of so-called professional defense intellectuals who have been brought into this nations capital. I
dont believe a lot of these often overconfident, sometimes arrogant young professors, mathematicians
63
64
Tom Wells, Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg (New York: St. Martins, 2001), 157.
65
Kuklick, Blind Oracles, 34-6. For a contemporary discussion of the role of defense intellectuals in thinking the
unthinkable, see Stewart Alsop, Our New Strategy: The Alternatives to Total War, The Saturday Evening Post,
December 1, 1962, 14-18.
66
Steiner, Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy, 78-79.
17
and other theorists have sufficient worldliness or motivation to stand up to the kind of enemy we
face.67 Even some civilians in government took the view that the value of asking defense intellectuals
about nuclear strategy was like asking people in the street.68 Still, it would be a mistake to think that
these attitudes led the uniformed military to dismiss the defense intellectuals out of hand. In light of
McNamaras patronage, the services had to learn to beat the Whiz Kids at their own game of systems
analysis.69 In that sense, the McNamara revolution endured well beyond his tenure and eventually
would spread throughout the bureaucracy of the U.S. government.70
So what can we conclude about the influence of civilian strategists during the Golden Age?
The primary evidence that Kuklick adduces concerning the irrelevance of civilian theories of the nuclear
revolution and MAD is that they were not reflected in the militarys actual war plans and operational
doctrine. But evidence that academic notions of MAD were not reflected in actual war plans and
military doctrine hardly constitutes proof that these ideas were irrelevant.71 Even though they did not
influence the military, civilian nuclear theories could influence other levels of U.S. Government,
particularly Presidential decision-making during nuclear crises.72 Jervis, for example, concedes that for
most of the history of American doctrine and war planning has been the attempt to design substitutes
67
General Thomas D. White, Strategy and the Defense Intellectuals, The Saturday Evening Post, May 4, 1963, 10.
Quoted in Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 255.
68
Spurgeon Keeny quoted in Herken, Counsels of War, 81.
69
For critiques of the effects of the systems analysis approach, see Eliot A. Cohen, Guessing Game: A Reappraisal
of Systems Analysis in Samuel P. Huntington, ed., The Strategic Imperative: New Policies for American Security
(Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1982), 163-91; Stephen Rosen, Systems Analysis and Quest for Rational Defense, The
Public Interest No. 76 (Summer 1984): 3-17; Colin S. Gray, What RAND Hath Wrought, Foreign Policy No. 4
(Autumn 1971): 111-29; and Edward N. Luttwak, Why We Need More Waste, Fraud & Mismanagement in the
Pentagon, Commentary, Vol. ?, No. ? (February 1982): 17-30.
70
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 257. For a detailed discussion of the real, but limited impact of systems
analysis in the Department of Defense, see Laurence E. Lynn and Richard L. Smith, Can the Secretary of Defense
Make a Difference? International Security Vol. 7, No. 1 (Summer 1982): 45-69. For discussion of its diffusion
throughout the rest of the U.S. Government, see Peter de Leon, The Influence of Analysis on U.S. Defense Policy,
Policy Sciences vol. 20, No. 2 (June 1987): 106; and Michael A. Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and
Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 154.
71
On the many non-strategic factors shaping war plans, see Desmond Ball, U.S. Strategic Forces: How Would They
Be used? International Security Vol. 7, No. 3 (Winter 1982/1983): 47. Also see 50 and Robert Jervis, The Meaning
of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989),
49-50.
72
Smith, The RAND Corporation, 230.
18
for damage limitation... But he goes on to suggest that the influence of the fear of war on political
leaders is not sensitive to the details of doctrine and war planning that preoccupy the specialists
[because] mutual vulnerability exists and casts an enormous shadow. This condition is not subtle nor
does it depend on the details of the strategic balance or targeting that may loom large to academics or
war planners; such details are dwarfed in the eyes of decision makers by the danger of overwhelming
destruction.73
Confirming Jerviss intuition, former Kennedy White House staffer Marcus Raskin attests that
most of the people who actually made high policy thought that planning for nuclear war was merely an
exercise in the theory of annihilation, that it could have no practical consequences.74 Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara informed Paul Nitze in 1962 that The concept of a worsened relative
military position after a general nuclear war is not a meaningful one to me when each side has the
capacity to destroy each others civilization.75 Even President Eisenhower, the architect of Massive
Retaliation, did not really believe that the U.S. could fight a nuclear war, remarking that you cant have
this kind of war. There just arent enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets. Endorsing a
version of MAD, Eisenhower was confident that, until an enemy [has] enough operational capability to
destroy most of our bases simultaneously and thus prevent retaliation by us, our deterrence remains
effective.76 In other words, there is good evidence that MAD provided the mental map that guided
policymakers through the early days of the nuclear age.77
One might argue, though, that even if policymakers did not accept nuclear war-fighting plans
and doctrines, their enshrinement in military standard operating procedures meant that in the event of
73
Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, 8-9 and 98.
74
Marcus G. Raskin, The Megadeath Intellectuals, The New York Review of Books November 14, 1963 at
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1963/nov/14/the-megadeath-intellectuals/.
75
Quoted in Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft, 36.
76
Quoted in Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 192.
77
For evidence of MADs continuing influence upon policymakers, see Paul C. Avey and Michael C. Desch, What
Do Policymakers Want from Us? Results of a Survey of Current and Former Senior National Security Decision
Makers, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 2 (June 2014), 233-35.
19
war they would nonetheless be implemented, much as the German Schlieffen Plan supposedly dragged
the German government into a war civilian leaders did not desire. 78 But the Schlieffen-Plan-caused-the-
First-World-War argument has been largely discredited and there are two additional reasons to be
skeptical that operational doctrine and plans would force the hands of civilian policymakers. 79
First, the argument that they would assumes that civilians were unaware of the plans content.
But there is ample evidence that policymakers in the Kennedy Administration, which took the first step
toward imposing civilian preferences on war plans, were well aware of the details of extant plans and
doctrine.80 Civilian strategists including Kissinger and Ellsberg learned the details of Joint Strategic
Capabilities Plan (JSCP) and independently brought them to the attention of National Security Adviser
McGeorge Bundy. 81 Bureaucratic and alliance politics, rather than rational strategic calculation,
accounted for the content of these war plans. 82
Second, it assumes that senior civilian policymakers would actually be hand-cuffed by them in a
crisis. But nuclear analyst Desmond Ball identifies 20 instances since 1945 when U.S. policymakers
considered using nuclear weapons but did not, despite the existence of these rigid war plans and
offensive nuclear doctrines. 83 The reason, in his view, was that that the pre-planned options in the
SIOP are too idealized, that they are a-strategic in the sense that they would be of little relevance in
78
Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1984), 24-34; and Stephen Van Evera, The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the
First World War, International Security, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Summer 1984): 58-107.
79
See Patrick Glynn, The Sarajevo Fallacy, The National Interest No. 9 (Fall 1987): 3-31 which draws on the path-
breaking scholarship of Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War, translated by Hajo Holborn and James
Joll (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967). Also see, Keir A. Lieber, The New History of World War I and What It Means
for International Relations Theory, International Security Vol. 32, No. 2 (2007): 155-191.
80
Scott D. Sagan, SIOP-62: The Nuclear War Plan Briefing to President Kennedy, International Security, Vol. 12,
No. 1 (Summer 1987): 22-51.
81
Andrew Preston, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, The NSC, and Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2006), 69-70.
82
The classic discussion of organizational processes is Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston: Little, Brown,
1967), which was originally commissioned by the RAND Corporation. Also see Graham T. Allison, Essence of
Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 67-100. On alliance politics see Gavin,
Nuclear Statecraft, chap. 2.
83
Ball, U.S. Strategic Forces, 41-42.
20
real-life situations.84 While Bundy worked to bring the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) more
in line with MAD, President Kennedys approach was to avoid taking on the Chiefs directly and ignore
their war plans in the short term while trying to change them in the longer term. His crisis behavior,
particularly but not exclusively during the Cuban Missile Crisis, amply demonstrates his willingness to
throw out the militarys war plans well before first contact with the enemy.85
A final question skeptics might pose is how do we know whether it was the ideas of the civilian
strategists that shaped Presidential thinking about nuclear strategy? Proving that they did definitively
will be a challenge for the reasons we suggested earlier. Despite that, there are nonetheless grounds for
believing that they did. First, given that military plans and doctrine rejected MAD, there is no reason to
think that their views shaped Presidential thinking. Second, it is widely recognized that the ideas of the
civilian strategists were in the air during policy debates both in internal U.S. Government discussions
but also in many public fora such as popular magazines like Look, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, and The
Saturday Evening Post -- and so there are reasonable grounds for thinking they were influential in
leading Presidents to think differently from military leaders about nuclear strategy. 86 Finally, while we
cannot rule out that high-level civilians came to their understanding of the nuclear revolution
independent of both the military and the civilian defense intellectuals, that does not seem like the most
likely explanation for how high-level civilian decision-makers with little expertise in the issue and lots of
other items on their plates came to think about the nuclear revolution.
Vietnam And The End of the Golden Age
84
Ball, U.S. Strategic Forces, 44.
85
Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms (New York: Touchstone,
1998), 208-10. For discussion of the impact of war plans in general, see Michael C. Desch, The Wartime Impact of
Peacetime War Planning, Joint Forces Quarterly, (Spring 2002): 94-104. For an account of the Cuban Missile crisis
that documents Kennedys willingness to ignore military plans in his crisis decision making, see Michael C. Desch,
When the Third World Matters: Latin America in US Grand Strategy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993), chapter 4.
86
Wildavsky, Practical Consequences of the Theoretical Study of Defense Policy, 102.
21
There is no doubt that the Golden Age came to an end roughly coincident with the Vietnam
War.87 Many think that this was no coincidence. Kaplan, for instance, links the two, arguing that
Americas Vietnam strategy was essentially a conventional-war version of the counterforce/no cities
theory using force as an instrument of coercion, withholding a larger force that could kill the hostage
of the enemys cities if he didnt back down.88 The logic here is that Kaufmanns critique of Massive
Retaliation connected a limited war in Vietnam to the larger struggle with the Soviet Union through the
need to maintain U.S. credibility. Schellings work on bargaining in trade negotiations seemed readily
transferable to strategic interaction, especially reinforcing the importance of holding off Communism in
South Vietnam to maintain Americas reputation as a stalwart ally and determined foe.89 Also, it
suggested that the limited use of force could signal U.S. resolve to stand by its ally in South Vietnam
through a graduated bombing campaign against the North.90
Proponents of the view that Schellings theories influenced Kennedy Administration policies
offer three pieces of evidence: First, Schellings work on nuclear strategy during the Berlin Crisis made
its way with President Kennedy to his weekend retreat in Hyannis Port, MA in the summer of 1961.
National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy subsequently reported that it made a deep impression on
the President.91 Second, Schellings biographer Robert Ayson concludes that his thinking behind this
body of work [in the early 1960s] was a major inspiration for the development of US strategic policy
during this period.92 One concrete implementation of his theories was the establishment of US-Soviet
87
Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, 3.
88
89
Larson, Deterrence Theory and the Cold War 100.
90
Making this argument are Michael Nacht, The War in Vietnam: The Influence of Concepts on Policy, ACIS
Working Paper No. 26 (Los Angeles: Center for International and Strategic Affairs, UCLA, July 1980), 12, fn. 16; and
Shapley, Promise and Power, 322-23. But for a caution against attributing too much influence to Schelling, see
91
Thomas Schelling, Nuclear Strategy in the Berlin Crisis, Washington, July 5, 1961 in Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1961-63 [Vol. XIV] Berlin Crisis, 1961-62 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office,
1993), 170, note.
92
Robert Ayson, Thomas Schelling and the Nuclear Age: Strategy as Social Science (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 14.
22
hot-line.93 Finally, John McNaughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs,
and one of Secretary of Defense McNamaras key advisors on Vietnam strategy, had been a friend and
colleague of Schellings at Harvard and constituted a direct personal link to the Administrations Vietnam
policy.94 The failure of these policies, so this conventional wisdom holds, discredited the whole defense
intellectual enterprise. 95
Attesting to the deteriorating intellectual climate for policy-relevant national security research,
Kaufmann and Schelling argued that the unrest caused by the Vietnam War in Cambridge nearly put an
end to the academic study and teaching of national security.96 As Schelling remarked apropos of his
post-Vietnam intellectual reorientation away from security studies, I lost the access, I lost the
audience, and I lost the motivation.97 The poster-child for how Vietnam supposedly brought to a close
the chapter on the civilian academic defense intellectual, of course, remains Daniel Ellsberg, who went
from ber-hawk to ultra-dove on Vietnam without even pausing in the middle.98 Indeed, some major
universities such as Columbia, MIT, Chicago, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley and Case Western Reserve
had institutional connections with other FFRDCs aside from RAND, such as the Institute for Defense
Analysis (IDA) which played a significant role in connecting academic research with U.S. national security
policy. These connections became particularly controversial during the height of the anti-war
movement on campus and most were severed.99
By the early 1970s, there was a marked change in the attitudes on campus about academics
participating in national security policy-making. Many still did as individuals, think of Kissinger and
93
Ayson, Thomas Schelling and the Nuclear Age, 32.
94
Shapley, Promise and Power, 302. Also see Kuklick, Blind Oracles, 137; and Fred Kaplan, All Pain, No Gain:
Nobel Laureate Thomas Schellings Little-Known Role in the Vietnam War, Slate, October 11, 2005 at
http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2127862 and Lawrence Freedman, Vietnam and the
Disillusioned Strategist, International Affairs Vol. 72, No. 1 (1996): 138, fn. 15.
95
Shapley, Promise and Power, 407 and Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 218.
96
Herken, Counsels of War, 220-21.
97
Quoted in Herken, Counsels of War, 313.
98
Abella, Soldiers of Reason, 213-29.
99
For discussion of the controversy of IDAs presence at Columbia, see Daniel Bell, Columbia and the New Left,
The Public Interest, No. 13 (1968): 61-101.
23
Zbigniew Brzezinski, but the bridge from the Ivory Tower to the Beltway increasingly became a one-way
street, with most of those taking it to Washington never returning to academe.100 As historian David
Engerman notes, there emerged a new kind of interface among the policy, public, and academic
spheres, one that was more individual and less institutional.101 To be sure, there were a handful of
senior scholars who managed to go back and forth people like Samuel Huntington, Joseph Nye, and
Jervis but as time went on, they became more and more the exception, rather than rule among
leading scholars after the Vietnam War.102
Following Economics to an Intellectual Dead-end
But was Vietnam the only, or even the most important, reason for the estrangement of
academics from policy relevant issues like nuclear strategy? As we saw above, there was evidence of
increasing intellectual tensions between academia and government well before Vietnam. The
establishment of RAND and other FFRDCs was a response to the growing difficulty in working with
universities directly. Their root was the increasing influence of the Economic approach to strategy. As
historian Marc Trachtenberg explains, there was an intellectual vacuum in the whole national security
area. The economists, and people heavily influenced by their style of thinking, were for a variety of
reasons drawn to this vacuum. What they had was something very general, a way of approaching
issues, rather than anything that in itself suggested substantive answers that went right to the heart of
the strategic problem.103 What was new, Eliot Cohen agrees, was not the use of numbers or
equations to help solve military problems but rather the coronation of one social science Economics
as the rightful queen of war-planning and strategy.104
100
Kuklick, Blind Oracles,182-203.
101
David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of Americas Soviet Experts. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 261.
102
For evidence of that, see Avey and Desch, What Do Policymakers Want From Us? 227-46.
103
Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, 15. Also see, 13 and Herken, Counsels of War, 49 and 75-76;
104
Cohen, Guessing Game, 166.
24
Brodie himself had initially believed that strategy could become a science and Economics
provided the model for it: the strategy of strategic bombing is very largely a matter of target selection,
where the economist (possibly also the psychologist) has at least as much to offer as the military
specialist.105 Kuklick and Alex Abella chronicle how the methodology of Economics came to dominate
RANDs approach to social science, pushing out the less formal and more historical approaches to
defense analysis.106 But as Economics came to dominate strategic analysis, method and theory became
increasingly more important than substance. Reviewing political scientist William Kaufmanns book The
McNamara Strategy, Brodie enthused that what is novel about the modern type of [defense] analysis is
the marvelous development and refinement of the method and also the conscious and open dedication
to the effort.107 The increasing dominance of Economic approaches to nuclear strategy led the field to
privilege academic concerns such as theory and methodology. As Brodie later reflected, elegance of
method is indeed marvelously seductive, even when it is irrelevant or inappropriate to the major
problems.108
This early confidence among civilian academic strategists about their ability to forge a science
of strategy quickly gave way to pessimism about the enterprise.109 In a letter to James Holland of the
Army War College, Brodie confessed that he was a "trifle uneasy" about his early call to make strategy a
science modelled on the methods of Economics: "I must tell you," he wrote, "that I am not so disposed
today as I was then to toss so many bouquets to the economists. It is not the substance of what I say in
that paper that bothers me so much as the tone. I am concerned with the fact that the relevant political
issues tend to be automatically de-emphasized by giving so much emphasis to the comparability of
105
Quoted in Steiner, Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy, 42.
106
Kuklick, Blind Oracles, 57-9 and 39. Also see, Abella, Soldiers of Reason, 92 and Larson, Deterrence Theory and
the Cold War 98.
107
Bernard Brodie, The McNamara Phenomenon, World Politics Vol. 17, No. 4 (July 1965): 674.
108
Bernard Brodie, Why Were We So (Strategically) Wrong? Foreign Policy, No. 5 (Winter, 1971-1972): 156.
109
25
strategy with economics."110 The problem was that by the mid-1960s the Economic approach to
strategic thought in the United States had reached something of an intellectual dead-end. This was
the result, in Trachtenbergs view, of the fact that the most basic issues were [at that point] analyzed
on a very abstract level. One could work out in general terms the argument for strategic stability, or
for various nuclear war-fighting strategies. But at this level of abstraction there were no final answers
at this highly abstract level of conceptualization the most basic intellectual tensions could not be
resolved.111 In retrospect, what contributed to ending the Golden Age of security studies was the
increasing influence of Economics in the sub-field which led to a growing preoccupation with theory and
method rather than substance.112
As they fell for the seduction of theoretical elegance and method, the Golden Age nuclear
strategists lost touch with the practical concerns of policymakers.113 Typical of the responses of
policymakers to this increasingly academic approach to strategy, Harvard Dean and Kennedy National
Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy lamented that there is enough, and perhaps too much, analysis
aimed at scholarly rigor and scientific validity. There is enough and perhaps too much system-building in
which models of this or that political process are constructed. There is enough, and perhaps too much,
detailed historical recording of political phenomena. What there is not enough of yet, and what I come
to praise, is the kind of academic work which proceeds from the same center of concern as that of the
man who is himself committed to an active part in government.114 Their center of concern was the
concrete policy problems they faced.
110
Brodie to Holland, July 13, 1966, Brodie Papers, Box 5, folder "Army War College," UCLA Library Manuscripts
Room. We thank Marc Trachtenberg for this source.
111
112
Bernard Brodie, Scientific Progress and Political Science, The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 85, No. 6 (December
1957): 315-19. Also see, Allen Whiting, The Scholar and the Policymaker, World Politics, Vol. 24, No. Supplement
(Spring 1972): 237;
113
Richard K. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1987), 195.
114
McGeorge Bundy, The Battlefields of Power and the Searchlights of the Academy, in The Dimensions of
Diplomacy, ed. E. A. J. Johnson (Baltimore, 1964), 9.
26
There were clear limits to the influence of civilian strategists, particularly when their increasingly
arcane theories led them beyond MAD. Bundy notes that there is an enormous gulf between what
political leaders really think about nuclear weapons and what is assumed in complex calculations of
relative advantage in simulated strategic warfare. Think Tank analysts can set levels of acceptable
damage well up in the tens of millions of live. They can assume that the loss of dozens of great cities is
somehow a real choice for sane men. They are in an unreal world. In the real world of political leaders
a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of ones own country would be
recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder 115 German Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss
similarly dismisses post-MAD American strategic thought as conceptual aids for the precalculation of
the inconceivable and incalculable nature of the specific.116 In other words, MAD was not only a fact, it
was also de facto policy despite war plans and doctrines that seemed to reject it. 117
Developing Criteria for Influence
We propose four criteria for influence based upon our examination of the decline of the early
Cold War Golden Age. First, the work should deal with important topics that policy-makers and
members of the general public care about. Moreover, it should focus on pressing problems within that
issue area; that is, it should be problem-driven. The initial golden age of academic theorizing provided
policymakers grappling with the problems of new technologies (the atomic bomb) in a new security
environment (the Cold War) with a new way of thinking. By contrast, as Economics approaches came to
dominate nuclear theorizing the scholarship seemed increasingly divorced from the problems that
policymakers actually encountered. Second, scholarship should focus on variables that government
policy can manipulate. The basic MAD logic provided a framework for policymakers to guide behavior in
nuclear crises.
115
Quoted in Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 361.
116
Quoted in Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 325.
117
Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 399. Also see, Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and
strategy in Americas Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 4 and 24-25.
27
Third, it should make explicit policy-recommendations about how to do so in both general
classes of cases as well as their application in specific instances on the policy agenda. The Economics
approaches gave stylized interpretations of how actors might behave but little discussion of how
historical and political circumstances would lead specific actors to behave. As James Goldgeier notes:
Policymakers typically want to know how to respond to a particular challenge. Informing them that X%
of cases turn out a certain way is unhelpful; advising them that the case they are facing is likely to
proceed in a certain direction because of particular underlying factors and offering prescriptions they
can follow is a more useful approach.118 Finally, scholarship needs to offer clear and consistent findings
about the effect of specific variables, something the basic MAD logic provided.119
Wohlstetters influential basing study nicely illustrates these criteria in practice. In it, he dealt
with an important, problem driven issue: how to make the deterrent effective as Soviet capabilities
increased. He identified a policy that the U.S. government could enact and made a clear
recommendation: diversify basing and platforms to guarantee survival. Finally, most accept the basic
argument that nuclear weapons must be survivable to effectively deter even if they differ on the precise
number of weapons necessary to meet that requirement.
This is also why, in the final analysis, it was the more ecelectic Brodie, rather than Economist
Thomas Schelling, whose ideas had the most influence upon actual nuclear statecraft. 120 Already in
1946, the former had set the basic axioms of the nuclear age the absence of any meaningful defense
against nuclear attack, the inevitable mutual vulnerability of each sides population, and the need for
secure second-strike capability which were the enduring facts of the nuclear age that policymakers
118
James Goldgeier, Addressing the Challenge: From Above and Below, International Studies Quarterly,
September 2, 2014, http://www.isanet.org/Publications/ISQ/Posts/ID/1425/Addressing-the-Challenge-From-
Above-and-Below.
119
For an excellent general discussion of this matter, see Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of
Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Carnell University Press, 1997), 97.
120
Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, 49. Of course, other theorists made important contributions as
well such as Wohlsetters distinction between first vs. second strike capability; Glenn Snyders examination of the
challenges of extended deterrence; and Schellings discussion of the threat that leaves something to chance.
28
recognized they had to grapple with.121 Brodies views directly influenced Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamaras thinking on the subject.122 While Brodie never achieved the insider influence on U.S.
nuclear strategy particularly doctrine and war plans -- that he sought, he became a very influential
public commentator on these issues.123 The reason he did, in Lawrence Freedmans judgment, was that
he had a better feel for real world politics because he was not a formal strategist in that he lacked
confidence in conclusions derived from war gaming or rigorous but abstracted analysis, isolated from
the real world.124
Schelling, on the other hand, is the more highly esteemed in scholarly circles these days,
recently winning a Nobel Prize in Economics.125 He undoubtedly made an original (and very important)
contribution to the study of strategy, though it was largely derivative, applying concepts from
Economics to the world of strategy.126 But after reviewing Schellings contributions to strategy, his
intellectual biographer Robert Ayson concludes that he ultimately fell victim to the sense of unreality
which afflicts aspects of nuclear strategy.127 Or as P.M.S. Blacket put it, Schellings approach, and that
of other game theorists like John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, ultimately failed because it did
not clothe the skeleton conflicts of the theory of games with the complex flesh and blood attributes of
real nations; hence the bizarre nature of some of their practical conclusions.128 Schelling himself
eventually acknowledged the limits of using domestic bargaining analogies to analyze international
conflict between states in the nuclear age.129 And by 1964, well before the Vietnam War had begun to
121
Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 44.
122
Steiner, Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy, 21-22.
123
124
Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 300.
125
Though eventually even Schelling, who pioneered the use of game theory in the analysis of deterrence, was not
regarded among academic Economists as being particularly rigorous methodologically. John J. Mearsheimer, A
Self-Enclosed World? in Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, eds., Problems and Methods in the
Study of Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press), 393-94
126
127
128
Blackett, 16.
129
Ayson, Thomas Schelling and the Nuclear Age, 152-53.
29
poison Ivory Tower/Beltway relations, he began to move away from strategic studies, perhaps a tacit
admission that his Economic approach to strategy had in fact reached a dead-end.130 Appropriately, his
eulogy of Brodie seems to cede the field of nuclear strategy to the dean of us all.131 In sum, the end of
the Golden Age was not only, or even primarily, driven by real-world events like Vietnam; it was largely
the result of the effort to make strategy a science modelled on Economics which led it to an
intellectual dead-end.
III. A Renaissance in Policy-Relevant Academic Nuclear Theorizing Today?
Given changes in the world since 1989, the field of national security affairs ought to be ripe for a
new golden age of theorizing about the influence of nuclear weapons upon statecraft. The changing
geopolitical circumstances lead some observers to argue that we are currently living in a second
nuclear age while others point to technological changes that may upend the basic MAD logic.132 Other
scholars are taking advantage of newly available data to look back over the long peace of the Cold
War, including the non-use of nuclear weapons, to challenge our understanding of the effects of nuclear
weapons on statecraft.133 Given these and other important changes in the international security
environment, we ought to see an efflorescence of scholarship on nuclear weapons today.
But this does not appear to be the case. Figure 4 shows that the trend of articles dealing with
WMD and arms control (which no doubt includes articles not dealing with nuclear strategy specifically)
in top IR journals. While there was a brief surge in 2009 (largely accounted for by a special issue on
nuclear issues in the Journal of Conflict Resolution that year) the overall trend shows a steady decline in
130
131
See Ayson, Thomas Schelling and the Nuclear Age, 114.
132
Paul Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics (New York: Times Books,
2012); Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, The End of MAD? The Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Nuclear Primacy,
International Security, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Spring 2006), 7-44; and Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, Nuclear Weapons
and International Politics, unpublished book manuscript.
133
Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft; Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear
Weapons since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); T.V. Paul, The Tradition of Non-Use of Nuclear
Weapons (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); John Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from
Hiroshima to Al Qaeda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
30
articles on these issues since the 1980s and especially since the mid-1990s. Anecdotal evidence lends
support to this basic claim. For example, Paul Bracken laments that today the quality of thinking about
nuclear weapons has reached a dangerously low level, in Washington and in the country. In
universities there is little knowledge of nuclear matters Think tanks have not filled the gap, either.134
Moreover, as Figure 5 indicates, the policy relevance of the work that has been done during this period
has also generally declined since the 1980s despite the brief surge in 2003. It is worth pointing out that
this surge was during a period in which the overall number of articles dealing with these issues was very
small. Finally, while the Stanton Foundation has generously funded work by junior scholars on nuclear
issues this has not yet been accompanied by an increase in demand in political science departments for
faculty with in depth knowledge of these issues.
Articles on WMD Proliferation and Arms Control in

Top IR Journals since 1980
30
25
Proportion (%)
20
15
WMD Proliferation and
10 Arms Control
5
0
1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012
Year
Figure 4: Decreasing Proportion of Nuclear Weapons Articles
134
Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age, 217. See also Thomas N. Nichols, No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National
Security Strategy, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 5-6.
31
Articles on WMD That Provide Policy Prescriptions
in Top IR Journals since 1980
90
80
70
Proportion (%)
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012
Year
Figure 5: Its Policy Relevance Varies Widely but Appears to be Declining
While these data reflect a broader set of issues than our focus on nuclear strategy, a closer
examination of the two broad waves of political science scholarship on nuclear politics reinforces this
interpretation of the data for the 1990 and 2000s and thus our qualified pessimism today. The first wave
occurred in the 1990s and utilized the U.S.-Soviet Cold War experience to debate what further nuclear
proliferation implied for international politics. In many ways the first wave followed the pattern
apparent in the early Cold War with the result that it eventually hit something of intellectual dead-end.
A second wave began in the late 2000s. This scholarship sought to utilize a wider array of evidence and
methodologies on nuclear strategies and behavior, including data from beyond the superpower
experience, to shed light on these questions. Scott Sagan characterizes this as a renaissance in nuclear
security studies.135 The question is whether the latest incarnation of academic nuclear strategizing will
avoid the Golden Ages and the first post-Cold War waves dead-end?
In the rest of this section we first outline the major premises of the optimism-pessimism debate
that flourished and then declined during the 1990s. We assess it based on the criteria for influence we
135
Scott D. Sagan, Two Renaissances in Nuclear Security Studies, H-Diplo|ISSF, No. 2 (2014).
32
outlined above. Next, we discuss some of the most important works in the recent wave of scholarship. A
full review of all the political science work on this topic is not practical given space constraints, but by
focusing on the most prominent pieces within the discipline we can get a clearer picture of the degree
to which that wave will constitute a renaissance in policy-relevant scholarship.
The 1990s Optimism-Pessimism Debate
The first wave crested in the wake of the Cold War and drew its lessons from the superpower
experience during that time.136 To be sure, scholars marshalled evidence from emerging nuclear states
as well, but the core of the historical evidence was U.S. and Soviet behavior and what it meant moving
forward. Yet by the end of the 1990s the debate tapered off with no real resolution. As lively and
consequential as the exchange was, writes David Karl, it quickly approached the point of diminishing
returns.137
No single work better epitomizes this scholarship than the Scott Sagan and Kenneth Waltz
volume The Spread of Nuclear Weapons in which the two authors debated one another on the
consequences of nuclear proliferation.138 The volume was easily the most influential contribution of the
optimist-pessimist debate within the academy. It is currently in its third edition and taken together the
three editions have generated a whopping 644 citations.139 Despite the dramatic global changes, the
positions of the two authors have not changed during this time. An examination of this work is therefore
useful in assessing why the debate faded at the end of the 1990s with little noticeable influence.
136
For general histories of the optimist-pessimism debate which make clear it began long before the end of the
Cold War, see Peter R. Lavoy, The Strategic Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation: A Review Essay, Security
Studies, 4/4 (Summer 1995); and Matthew Kroenig, The History of Proliferation Optimism: Does It Have a
Future? Journal of Strategic Studies, forthcoming. The key works early in the wave, which most others responded
to in one way or another, were all originally published in the early 1990s: Peter D. Feaver, Guarding the Guardians:
Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992); Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of
Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Bruce G.
Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1993.
137
David J. Karl, Proliferation Optimism and Pessimism Revisited, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 34, No. 4
(August 2011), 620.
138
Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate, (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2013 [2003, 1995]).
139
Citation count from Google Scholar for the three editions, December 4, 2014.
33
Both Sagan and Waltz accepted that nuclear weapons generally made conflict between states
less likely. They also agreed that relatively small nuclear arsenals could create this effect. Where they
parted company over how robust this stability was, particularly among the emerging nuclear powers.
For Waltz nuclear deterrence was robust and the United States should not worry about nuclear
proliferation to new states.140 Sagan countered deterrence could fail in any number of ways and
therefore proliferation was dangerous. For him, new nuclear states would repeat the mistakes of the
Cold War superpowers, such as formulating destabilizing operational plans, contemplating and perhaps
executing preventive wars (especially in the absence of civilian control of the military), and failing to
adequately safeguard their arsenals.141
Despite its widespread attention in the academy, the debate reportedly had little influence on
actual policy. To begin with, policymakers in Washington flatly rejected the optimist prescription.142
They accepted the pessimist prescription to oppose proliferation but did not do so as a result of the
pessimists logic. This lack of influence for the pessimist position is evident in two ways. First, U.S. policy
had vigorously opposed proliferation since at least the 1960s.143 Second, the reason had less to do with
140
Kenneth N. Waltz, More May be Better, in Sagan and Waltz, eds., The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An
Enduring Debate, 20. See also David J. Karl, Proliferation Pessimism and Emerging Nuclear Powers, International
Security, 21/3, (Winter 1996-1997), 103-104, 111-114; Jordan Seng, Less is More: Command and Control
Advantages of Minor Nuclear States, Security Studies, 6/4 (Summer 1997), 50-92.
141
Sagan, More Will Be Worse, in Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons. See also, Peter D. Feaver,
"Command and Control in Emerging Nuclear Nations," International Security, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Winter 1992/93);
Peter D. Feaver, Neooptimists The Enduring Problems of Nuclear Proliferation, Security Studies, 6/4 (Summer
1997), 95-97, 123; Lloyd R. Leavitt and Paul Bracken, Nuclear Proliferation: Neither Safe nor Stable in Hakan
Wiberg et al, eds., Inadvertent Nuclear War, 206-217; Jeffrey W. Knopf, Recasting the Proliferation Optimism-
Pessimism Debate, Security Studies, 12/1 (Autumn 2002), 62, 64.
142
Thus Peter Feaver writes that Regardless of how persuasive Waltz and the nuclear optimists may be in an
academic setting, it is doubtful they would ever be persuasive in a U.S. policy setting. It is official
U.S. policy that the spread of nuclear weapons is bad. Frank Gavin is blunter, stating that Waltz recommends
policies that have no chance of being treated seriously, to say nothing of being adopted Peter D. Feaver,
Optimists, Pessimists, and Theories of Nuclear Proliferation Management: Debate, Security Studies, Vol. 4, No. 4
(Summer 1995), 770; and Francis J. Gavin, Politics, History and the Ivory Tower-Policy Gap in the Nuclear
Proliferation Debate, Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 35, No. 4 (August 2012), 597.
143
Benjamin Frankel, The Brooding Shadow: Systemic Incentives and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation, Security
Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3-4 (1993), 37-78; Nicholas L. Miller, Nuclear Dominoes: A Self-Defeating Prophecy? Security
Studies Vol. 23, No.1 (Spring 2014): 33-73; and Gavin Politics, History and the Ivory Tower-Policy Gap in the
Nuclear Proliferation Debate, 587-592.
34
concerns about safety and civilian control the focus of the pessimist position than an underlying
strategic logic: If other countries acquired nuclear weapons it would constrain U.S. freedom of action. As
Les Aspin, then Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, put it in June 1992: A world without
nuclear weapons would not be disadvantageous to the United States. In fact, a world without nuclear
weapons would actually be better. Nuclear weapons are still the big equalizer, but now the United
States is not the equalizer but the equalizee.144 In making these arguments policymakers implicitly
accepted the underlying MAD logic: nuclear weapons restrain opponents, including the United States.145
To be sure, part of the lack of influence was the result of different concerns from policymakers.
In other words, the demand-side part of the equation, the specific challenges policymakers face and
thus how they utilize social science, differ from academic concerns. For instance, as Peter Feaver notes,
a finding that nuclear deterrence works 99.5% of the time would be in the social science theory hall of
fame, but it would not make nuclear proliferation trivial and would still generate concern in
government circles.146 Moreover, policymakers in Washington no doubt focus on how nuclear
proliferation effects U.S. interests. They may be less interested or concerned with the other issues that
Sagan identifies or implications for overall global stability if that stability is bought at the price of U.S.
leverage. How much risk to accept and the nature of U.S. interests are ultimately political judgments
that social science is hard pressed to adjudicate.
The lack of influence on either side of the optimist-pessimist debate also reflects the absence of
several critical components for relevance we identified above. This supply-side problem, the content of
what scholars were providing, magnified the difficulties of the tough demand-side environment. Most
144
Quoted in Waltz, Waltz Responds to Sagan, in Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, 107. See also
Gavin, Politics, History and the Ivory Tower-Policy Gap in the Nuclear Proliferation Debate, 589-592; and Peter D.
Feaver, Letter: Proliferation Pessimism and Emerging Nuclear Powers, International Security, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Fall
1997), 192.
145
Stephen Walt makes a similar point, All the Nukes that You Can Use, May 24, 2010, ForeignPolicy.com,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/05/24/all_the_nukes_that_you_can_use.
146
Peter D. Feaver, Proliferation Optimism and Theories of Nuclear Operations, Security Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3-4
(1993), 162.
35
importantly, the Waltz-Sagan and optimist-pessimist debate more broadly moved away from problem-
driven scholarship. The questions the debate posed and the problems it identified simply could not be
answered with the evidence and methods available at the time leading to an inconclusive outcome. As a
result, scholarship came to rely largely upon deduction, becoming less sensitive to policy concerns as it
sought to establish the superiority of one academic theory over another. In this environment, just as
earlier, basic intellectual tensions could not be resolved. As Gavin points out, the Sagan-Waltz debate
focused on the weapons and postures, and not the underlying politics.147 As a result, this limited its
potential for influence. Nor has there been much effort to incorporate the newly available history into
the more recent volumes. In addition, there was no sustained discussion on how to link nuclear strategy
to foreign policy objectives in the new environment. This is particularly problematic given the somewhat
incoherent nuclear strategy outlined in the 1994 Nuclear Posture Review (and repeated in 2002 and
2010).148 Finally, there was little in the way of specific policy recommendations. This was particularly
noticeable on the optimist side, as Waltz made little effort to identify how certain cases might deviate
from the dominant trends. Such an omission is particularly important given the concerns surrounding
even a single instance of nuclear use. This is not to say that the debate was completely irrelevant or
unimportant; the two sides usefully challenged conventional wisdom among national security officials.
Yet ultimately the debate had less impact than it might have because the respective positions were
driven more by debates among international relations theorists than by the concrete concerns of
policymakers.
A Contemporary Nuclear Studies Renaissance?
A second post-Cold War wave of nuclear studies builds upon the optimist-pessimist debate as
well as the earlier nuclear literature to assess the broader political effects of nuclear weapons. While
there are important disagreements, two important findings are emerging. First, larger force structures
147
Gavin, The Ivory Tower-Policy Gap in the Nuclear Proliferation Debate, 583.
148
Nichols, No Use, Chapter 2.
36
and more active force postures may be better for individual states.149 Second, this does not mean that
nuclear weapons will lead to a more pacific international system.150 To reach these conclusions scholars
have expanded the evidentiary base and methods deployed to tackle these questions. The common
point of departure for these studies is the basic MAD insight that nuclear weapons can inflict terrible
destruction and there is no robust defense possible. As a result, they are bound to affect interstate
politics. The key is to use the new evidence to determine the types and limits of these effects.
It is too early to fully assess the influence of these works on policy and space constraints prevent
discussion of all the recent works on nuclear politics. Rather, we present some basic data on trends and
then highlight four of the most influential recent works on nuclear strategy to assess the likelihood that
they will contribute to a renaissance of policy-relevant nuclear scholarship. We find a mixed picture:
While there is reason for some optimism there is also cause for concern that this renaissance, like the
Cold War Golden Age, may end up in an intellectual dead-end as method-driven research crowds out
problem-driven work.
To begin, work on nuclear politics continues to deal with a very important topic. Public opinion
polls consistently show that nuclear proliferation and its consequences remain at the top of the publics
perception of critical threats to U.S. vital interests, with 63% saying this about general proliferation
149
In addition to the works cited below, see for example Matthew Kroenig and Michael Weintraub, The Nuclear
Balance and International Conflict, Mortara Working Paper 2011-10 (June 2011); Erik Gartzke, Jeffrey M. Kaplow,
and Rupal N. Mehta, Deterrence and the Structure of Nuclear Forces, Paper Presented at the 2013 Annual
Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association; and Kyle Beardsley and Victor Asal, Nuclear Weapons as
Shields, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Vol. 26, No. 3 (July 2009), 235-255.
150
On this point see, for example, Erik Gartzke and Dong-Joon Jo, argaining, Nuclear Proliferation, and Interstate
Disputes, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 53/2 (April 2009); Robert Rauchhuas, Evaluating the Nuclear Peace
Hypothesis: A Quantitative Approach, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 53, No. 2 (April 2009), 258-277; Mark
Bell and Nicholas L. Miller, Questioning the Effect of Nuclear Weapons on Conflict, Journal of Conflict Resolution,
forthcoming; Gartzke et al., Deterrence and the Structure of Nuclear Forces; David Sobek, Dennis M. Foster, and
Samuel B. Robison, Conventional Wisdom? The Effect of Nuclear Proliferation on Armed Conflict, International
Studies Quarterly, Vol. 56, (2012), 149-162; and Rachel Whitlark, All Options on the Table? Nuclear Proliferation,
Preventive War, and a Leaders Decision to Intervene, Ph.D. Dissertation, George Washington University, 2014;
Karl, Proliferation Optimism and Pessimism Revisited; and Hal Brands and David Palkki, Saddam, Israel, and the
Bomb: Nuclear Alarmism Justified? International Security, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Summer 2011), 137.
37
and 64% about Iran specifically (see figure 6).151 Concern with nuclear weapons extends to top
policymakers as well. For instance, in 2009 President Obama noted that if one nuclear weapon
exploded in one city there is no end to what the consequences might be152
American Attitude toward Nuclear Proliferation

(Percentage of Americans Who See Nuclear
Proliferation as a Critical Threat to U.S. Vital
Interests)
90
80
70
Percentage (%)
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1995 1999 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012
Year
Figure 6: Proliferation as a Threat
There is cause for concern, though, that the new scholarship is not engaging the most salient
problems of nuclear proliferation and strategy. Following broader trends in political science, the work
has become increasingly quantitative over time. As Figure 7 suggests, the percentage of articles
employing scientific approaches to studying these questions has increased, with quantitative
approaches becoming increasingly common in recent years. There is a vigorous debate on coding
151
Foreign Policy in the New Millennium: Results of the 2012 Chicago Council Survey of American Public Opinion and
U.S. Foreign Policy, Dina Smeltz, Project Director, (Chicago, IL: CCGA, 2012), Figure 2.1 at
http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/UserFiles/File/Task%20Force%20Reports/2012_CCS_Report.pdf
152
The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, Remarks by President Barack Obama, Hradcany Square,
Prague, Czech Republic, April 5, 2009. See also Mueller, Atomic Obsession, x-xi.
38
decisions and how appropriate such methods are to studying nuclear issues in the first place.153 Our
purpose is not to engage that debate but rather to assess the implications of this shift for the likelihood
the work will influence policy. On this score the trends are not cause for optimism. As Figure 8
demonstrates, the more scientific approaches tend to be less associated with a willingness to make
explicit policy recommendations than their qualitative brethren. Moreover, Yale political scientist
Alexandre Debs writes that the new wave of quantitative studies has not lived up to its promise
because it has focused too much on questions of methodology. In order to move forward nuclear
studies should pay greater attention to theory, history and politics.154 In other words, the discipline
seems to be following the Cold War wave into an intellectual dead-end by privileging method over
problem.
Quantitative and Formal Methods Used

100 in Articles on WMD in Top IR Journals
(1980-2012)
80
Proportion (%)
60
40 Formal
Quantitative
20
0
1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012
Year
Figure 7: It is Increasing Formal and Quantitative
153
H-Diplo|ISSF forum on What We Talk About When We Talk About Nuclear Weapons, June 15, 2014,
http://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Forum-2.pdf; What new academic research can teach us about nuclear
weapons, Monkey Cage blog, @www.washingtonpost.com, July 8, 2014; Debating the Benefits Nuclear
Superiority for Crisis Bargaining, March 25, 2013,
http://www.whiteoliphaunt.com/duckofminerva/2013/03/debating-the-benefits-nuclear-superiority-for-crisis-
bargaining-part-i.html; Alexander H. Montgomery and Scott D. Sagan, The Perils of Predicting Proliferation,
Journal of Conflict Resolution, 53/2 (April 2009); and Bell and Miller, Questioning the Effects of Nuclear Weapons
on Conflict.
154
Alexandre Debs, The Curious Case of Nuclear Studies, Monkey Cage blog @www.washingtonpost.com, July
10, 2014; Tom Nichols, Response to What We Do, and Why it Matters, H-Diplo|ISSF, June 30, 2014.
39
Quantitative, Qualitative, and Formal
Methods Used in Articles on WMD That
Provide Policy Prescriptions in Top IR
Journals (1980-2012)
100
Proportion (%)
80
60
40 Formal
20
0 Qualitative
Quantitative
Year
Figure 8: Methodological Approach and Policy Prescriptions for WMD
Matthew Fuhrmann, Todd Sechser, and Matthew Kroenig have produced some of the most
widely discussed recent pieces on nuclear strategy using sophisticated methodological approaches. The
authors various works spurred lively discussions at the Duck of Minerva political science blog, a forum
hosted by H-Diplo that engaged some of the most prominent nuclear scholars, and comments from
political scientists and former policymakers at the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post.155 In their
first article, Sechser and Fuhrmann argue that while nuclear weapons may be useful for deterrence they
find that the weapons are not useful when compelling adversaries (in fact nuclear superiority can make
compellence less likely to succeed). In a follow-up article the authors find that formal defense
guarantees by nuclear powers, but not the actual positioning of nuclear weapons on allied territories,
reduces challenges to nuclear clients. This, they argue, shows the value of extended deterrence
155
Todd S. Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, Crisis Bargaining and Nuclear Blackmail, International Organization,
67/1 (January 2013); Matthew Kroenig, Nuclear Superiority and the Balance of Resolve: Explaining Nuclear Crisis
Outcomes, International Organization, 67/1 (January 2013); What We Talk About When We Talk About Nuclear
Weapons, H-Diplo|ISSF Forum, June 15, 2014, http://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Forum-2.pdf; Debating the
Benefits of Nuclear Superiority for Crisis Bargaining, Duck of Minerva blog, March 25-28, 2013, @
www.whiteoliphaunt.com/duckofminerva; What New Academic Research Can Teach Us About Nuclear
Weapons, Monkey Cage blog, July 2014, @ www.washingtonpost.com. All accessed December 4, 2014. The
Google citation counts as of December 4, 2014, for the articles are 29 (Sechser and Fuhrmann) and 19 (Kroenig)
but will undoubtedly rise as time passes.
40
commitments.156 Matthew Kroenig argues that in crises between two nuclear states the side with the
larger nuclear arsenal is more likely to win the dispute. Though many have critiqued the basic claim that
superiority can translate into political leverage it is worth pointing out that several quantitative and
qualitative studies have reached similar conclusions.157
These studies are important but are unlikely to have much policy influence as they currently
stand. First, in good social science fashion the authors seek to isolate the impact of nuclear weapons and
then report general changes in the risks, odds, or likelihood of conflict. This is not limited to these
studies, indeed, most qualitative studies seek to generalize from a set of representative or most-likely
cases to some larger universe. To some extent this can be addressed by simply examining if specific
cases of interest share characteristics with those in the model.
There is a more fundamental problem, however. Most of the current and likely
recommendations are vague, face major political problems of implementation, or are difficult to
implement even if there was a willingness to do so. For example, Colin Kahl, a political scientist and
national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, notes that Washington must often worry about
factors difficult to include in typical models such as the goals of states, the possibility of a stability-
instability-paradox (the fear that stability at the strategic nuclear level essentially cancels out the
arsenals and makes conventional conflict more likely), and experience with nuclear weapons. This has
obvious implications for how worried policymakers will be about the prospects of new nuclear states
156
Matthew Fuhrmann and Todd S. Sechser, Signaling Alliance Commitments: Hand-Tying and Sunk Costs in
Extended Nuclear Deterrence, American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming.
157
For quantitative examples, see Kyle Beardsely and Victor Asal, Winning with the Bomb, Journal of Conflict
Resolution, 53/2 (April 2009); Gartzke and Jo, Bargaining, Nuclear Proliferation, and Interstate Disputes. For
qualitative examples see Keir A. Lieber, War and the Engineers: The Primacy of Politics over Technology, (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), chap. 5; and Daryl G. Press, Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military
Threats (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), chaps. 34; Marc Trachtenberg, The Influence of Nuclear
Weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis, International Security, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Summer 1985), pp. 137-163; and Betts,
Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance. Betts presents the balance of interests and balance of capabilities as more
discrete explanations than Kroenig, but Kroenig borrows from Betts when he explains the intuition behind his
(Kroenigs) argument, see Betts, ibid., 178; and Kroenig, Nuclear Superiority and the Balance of Resolve, 150.
41
attempting to compel adversaries.158 There are different problems with extended deterrence schemes:
If they are effective generally why should we not simply extend such guarantees to all states? Would
that limit conflict or simply be seen as incredible in most cases? At the least, it would risk embroiling the
nuclear patron in numerous disputes of peripheral importance.
Or take Kroenigs major finding: nuclear advantage conveys bargaining leverage. How large does
a nuclear arsenal and the advantage need to be in order to gain leverage? How much leverage does one
get? And how can one best exercise this leverage? Presumably, there are diminishing returns at some
point, some diplomatic and conventional military actions alongside a nuclear advantage are more
effective than others, and some types of challenges are more likely to be deterred than others.
Expanding nuclear arsenals can also spark arms races that leave states less secure, hinder other policies,
and face cost and domestic political constraints. To be fair, Kroenig recognizes these limitations.159
Nonetheless, there are clear limits to how useful nuclear weapons can be in different circumstances.
Taking the next step to better understand magnitude, situational, and threshold effects something
that both quantitative and qualitative scholarship often struggles with will help scholars and
policymakers better adjudicate between the various tradeoffs they face in adopting any given policy and
increase the likelihood this type of scholarship will have influence.
Keir Lieber and Daryl Press have written several articles on U.S. nuclear history, force posture
and capabilities. Some of the work is consistent with the Kroenig claim that more is better, as Lieber and
Press argue that a larger number of nuclear weapons constitute a more effective deterrent against
158
Colin Kahl, How Worried Should U.S. Policymakers Be About Nuclear Blackmail, Monkey Cage blog, @
www.washingtonpost.com, July 9, 2014. For a scholarly study that reinforces some of Kahls points, see Michael
Horowitz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons and International Conflict: Does Experience Matter? Journal of
Conflict Resolution, 53/2 (April 2009). Joseph Nye made a similar point twenty-two years earlier, see Joseph S. Nye,
Jr., Nuclear Learning and U.S.-Soviet Security Regimes, International Organization, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Summer 1987),
371-402.
159
Kroenig, Nuclear Superiority and the Balance of Resolve, 168.
42
nuclear strikes than only a few such weapons.160 While qualitative and more attentive to context there
are still issues with threshold effects and the manipulability of some of these factors that may vex
policymakers.
The other strand of their work meets many of the criteria we outlined above for relevance.
Specifically, they conduct careful examinations of how changing technology and adversary capabilities
influence the lethality and reliability of U.S. nuclear arsenals. They presented their initial findings in two
articles in 2006: one in the academic journal International Security and the other in the influential
Foreign Affairs. Both articles sparked responses from scholars and policymakers and both enjoy
garnered high citation counts.161 Building upon this work, Lieber and Press highlight the implications of
technological changes for U.S. policy toward specific adversaries and likely adversary responses. They
therefore focus on manipulable variables, make specific recommendations, and provide clear findings.
In new work Vipin Narang makes an important contribution to understanding regional nuclear
powers force postures and the consequences of those postures. Its recent nature makes it difficult to
determine the academic impact of the work at this time. Narang uses qualitative and advanced
quantitative techniques to argue that nuclear force postures that envision using nuclear weapons early
against conventional forces are best at deterring low- and high-level challenges. This asymmetric
escalation posture means delegating launch authority and directly integrating nuclear weapons into
160
Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, Nuclear Weapons and International Politics, chaps. 2-3. See also their earlier
individual work on these issues, Keir A. Lieber, War and the Engineers: The Primacy of Politics over Technology,
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), chap. 5; and Daryl G. Press, Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess
Military Threats (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), chaps. 34
161
Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, The End of MAD? The Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Nuclear Primacy,
International Security, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Spring 2006), 7-44; Keir A. Lieber, The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy, Foreign
Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 2 (March/April 2006), 42-54. Google citation counts as of December 4, 2014: 135 and 151,
respectively. For responses see Jeffrey S. Lantis, Tom Sauer, James J. Wirtz, Keir A. Lieber, and Daryl G. Press,
Correspondence: The Short Shadow of U.S. Nuclear Primacy, International Security, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Winter
2006/07), 174-193; and Peter C. W. Flory, Keith Payne, Pavel Podvig, Alexei Arbatov, Keir A. Lieber, and Daryl G.
Press, Nuclear Exchange: Does Washington Really Have (or Want) Nuclear Primacy?, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No.
4 (September/October 2006).
43
battlefield planning. In other words, to deter conventional assaults states must develop a force posture
explicitly designed to do so.162
This meets many of the criteria outlined above for a work to be in a good position to influence
policymaking. It pays close attention to the politics and history of specific countries to show how general
conditions cause specific countries to act and the consequences for those decisions for international
stability. The focus on force posture is a manipulable variable in those specific countries. It also
highlights the tradeoffs U.S. policymakers face if and when they encourage regional nuclear powers to
adopt specific force postures. Narangs work provides new insight into when problems such as the
stability-instability paradox are likely to be particularly acute.163 In addition, though he does not discuss
it specifically, his findings reinforce the basic intuition of MAD by showing that the risks of war go to
almost zero even if both sides do not have a robust second strike capability.
IV. Conclusions and Recommendations.
What are the lessons of the Golden Age for today? We argue that academic strategy did have
important effects on policy. At times this was direct, as was the case with Wohlstetters basing study.
More often it was indirect, working not through the formulation of doctrine or the drafting of
operational plans, but rather indirectly by providing the intellectual frameworks and mental road-maps
that shaped Presidents thinking about the utility of nuclear weapons during confrontations with other
states. Despite bureaucratic pathologies within the U.S. military, which led the services to adopt nuclear
warfighting doctrines and force postures, in the heat of crises, Presidents spoke and behaved as if
Brodies assessment of the nuclear revolution was correct that the absolute weapon was of use only
162
Vipin Narang, Posturing for Peace? Pakistans Nuclear Postures and South Asian Stability, International
Security, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Winter 2009/10); Vipin Narang, What Does It Take to Deter? Regional Power Nuclear
Postures and International Conflict, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 57, No. 3 (June 2013); and Vipin Narang,
Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2014)
163
On the stability-instability paradox see Glenn H. Snyder, The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror, in
Paul Seabury (ed.), The Balance of Power (San Francisco: Chandler 1965), 184201; and David J. Karl, Proliferation
Optimism and Pessimism Revisited, Journal of Strategic Studies, 34/4 (August 2011), 619-641.
44
for deterring an adversary from using one. In other words, MAD was not only a fact, it was also a policy
at the highest level.
But the history of the Golden Age also tells a cautionary tale: Intellectual dynamics within
universities and even among social scientists working at places like RAND can under certain
circumstances lead nuclear strategists into intellectual dead-ends when internal disciplinary dynamics
lead to the privileging of sophisticated methods and theoretical elegance over real world problems. This
is by no means an across-the-board indictment of sophisticated social science methods, but it is an
illustration of their limits. For example, the highly quantitative approach of operations research proved
extremely useful to military planners during the Second World War but the mathematical tools of
Systems Analysis proved useless, if not counterproductive, as a basis for formulating higher-level U.S.
national security policy during the Cold war.164 The Golden Age has many examples that demonstrate
the compatibility of cutting-edge social science and policy relevance but it also shows that the quest to
completely make strategy a science is quixotic.
Reports of a renaissance in academic nuclear strategy today therefore seem premature. As
the TRIP journal survey shows, academic international relations in general is becoming less policy
relevant, at least in terms of willingness to offer explicit policy recommendations. The trends among
articles looking specifically at nuclear issues are similar: Fewer scholars are exploring these issues and
their willingness to offer policy advice varies widely. The explanation for this seems to be that as more
scientific approaches become dominant in the field, willingness to do policy-relevant work declines. In
order to avoid following the Golden Age into an intellectual cul de sac, and to truly realize a
renaissance in policy relevant academic strategy, the current generation of scholars ought to embrace
the sort of problem-driven approach to their work that characterized the early years of the nuclear age.
Method-driven or purely theoretical scholarship is likely to lead us back into a dead-end.
164
James R. Schlesinger, Quantitative Analysis and National Security, World Politics Vol. 15, No. 2 (January 1963):
298. For similar sentiments from a war-time practitioner of highly quantitative operations analysis, see Blackett, 9.
45
While the most common examples of methods-driven research tend to use quantitative
approaches, there is no logical reason that such approaches cannot be policy relevant. As our Golden
Age history shows, many of the leading figures in nuclear strategy employed cutting-edge social science
techniques and developed elegant theories along the way. The problem is not so much the technique
itself or the effort to employ theory but rather the privileging of them over practical problems. Indeed
we see some danger today with the growing preoccupation with qualitative and experimental methods
that they too, if taken too far, could lead to an intellectual dead-end. Figure 3 tells a cautionary tale in
this regard inasmuch as qualitative methods seem to be only slightly more relevant than other
approaches save explicit policy analysis.
While much of this recent work could be relevant, scholars must work harder to translate their
general findings into specific recommendations for nuclear strategy. Many of these questions are
amenable to the type of careful historical analysis policymakers tend to find appealing.165 For example,
scholars can trace the underlying processes in otherwise similar cases that resulted in success and
failure. They can also examine in more depth the decisions of U.S. allies to abandon nuclear programs,
as this is often put forward as a justification for a large U.S. nuclear force.166 Conducting these types of
analyses can help determine the extent to which nuclear weapons were important in the outcome and
how policymakers managed or failed to manipulate their nuclear arsenal for political leverage. Some
scholars have done this in a single work.167 Others can build on the existing work in the most recent
nuclear wave. These are by no means the only ways that scholars can address these questions. However
scholars choose to do so it is clear that if the findings of the most recent wave are going to be relevant
165
Avey and Desch, What do Policymakers Want from Us? 231-232.
166
There are a large number of recent works on exactly this issue. See, for example, Nicholas L. Miller, The Secret
Success of Nonproliferation Sanctions, International Organization, forthcoming, Fall 2014; Nicholas L. Miller,
Nuclear Dominoes: A Self-Defeating Prophecy? Security Studies 23, No.1 (Spring 2014): 33-73; Gene Gerzhoy,
"Go Your Own Way? Alliance Coercion, Military Dependence, and West German Nuclear Ambitions," Working
Paper, June 2014; Alexander Lanoszka, Protection States Trust?: Major Power Patronage, Nuclear Behavior, and
Alliance Dynamics, Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale, 2014; and Alexandre Debs and Nuno P. Monteiro, Nuclear Politics: The
Strategic Logic of Proliferation, book manuscript, April 2014.
167
For a good example see Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era, chaps. 9-10.
46
and ultimately have an influence on the policy debate scholars must address broadly important
problems, present clear findings, focus on factors that policy can influence, and make explicit
recommendations when and how to do so.
It is important to add a final caveat: Our criteria for relevance increase the likelihood for
influence but do not guarantee it. In this sense they are akin to a necessary rather than a sufficient
condition for influence. Policymakers may choose to ignore, dismiss, or simply be unaware of the
findings of a very relevant study for any number of reasons. On the other hand, as the history of the
Golden Age of nuclear strategy shows, studies that fail to meet these criteria are unlikely to have any
influence by definition.
47

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Why the Wizards of Armageddon Ran Into An Intellectual Dead-end:

intervention) and other issue areas in the field.2

least as measured by their practitioners willingness to offer policy recommendations, as Figure 3

Methodologies and Policy Prescriptions in

Figure 3 Methodologies That Offer Policy Prescriptions in IR Journals

that their writings had a rather big influence.12

for the role of natural scientists in U.S. nuclear weapons policy.19

and approaches of Economics that brought academic nuclear strategy to a dead-end. 21

up once again in an intellectual cul-de-sac.

balled him with Secretary of the Air Force Thomas Finletter.39

activities policy research and World Politics to other institutions.42

applied them to defense problems.49

signed off on its recommendations.52

analysis both inside and outside of the U.S. Government.55

in Athens, Greece and Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1962.61

and Fred Hoffman.64

would spread throughout the bureaucracy of the U.S. government.70

policymakers through the early days of the nuclear age.77

accounted for the content of these war plans. 82

Vietnam And The End of the Golden Age

through a graduated bombing campaign against the North.90

movement on campus and most were severed.99

leading scholars after the Vietnam War.102

Following Economics to an Intellectual Dead-end

as the rightful queen of war-planning and strategy.104

issues tend to be automatically de-emphasized by giving so much emphasis to the comparability of

method rather than substance.112

concrete policy problems they faced.

Developing Criteria for Influence

number of weapons necessary to meet that requirement.

the real world.124

III. A Renaissance in Policy-Relevant Academic Nuclear Theorizing Today?

environment, we ought to see an efflorescence of scholarship on nuclear weapons today.

faculty with in depth knowledge of these issues.

Articles on WMD Proliferation and Arms Control in

Figure 4: Decreasing Proportion of Nuclear Weapons Articles

Figure 5: Its Policy Relevance Varies Widely but Appears to be Declining

to which that wave will constitute a renaissance in policy-relevant scholarship.

The 1990s Optimism-Pessimism Debate

adequately safeguard their arsenals.141

government circles.146 Moreover, policymakers in Washington no doubt focus on how nuclear

that social science is hard pressed to adjudicate.

A Contemporary Nuclear Studies Renaissance?

American Attitude toward Nuclear Proliferation

Figure 6: Proliferation as a Threat

Quantitative and Formal Methods Used

Figure 7: It is Increasing Formal and Quantitative

Figure 8: Methodological Approach and Policy Prescriptions for WMD

qualitative studies have reached similar conclusions.157

cases of interest share characteristics with those in the model.

nuclear patron in numerous disputes of peripheral importance.

increase the likelihood this type of scholarship will have influence.

explicitly designed to do so.162

IV. Conclusions and Recommendations.

at the highest level.

is by no means an across-the-board indictment of sophisticated social science methods, but it is an

completely make strategy a science is quixotic.

Reports of a renaissance in academic nuclear strategy today therefore seem premature. As

Method-driven or purely theoretical scholarship is likely to lead us back into a dead-end.

approaches save explicit policy analysis.

recommendations when and how to do so.

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