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Nuclear Revelations: A Review Essay
- International Security
- The MIT Press
- Volume 6, Number 3, Winter 1981/1982
- pp. 195-206
- Review
- Additional Information
Nuclear Revelations1JohnKeegan A Review Essay Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Revolution: International Politics before and after Hiroshima (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1981),283 pages. A l l had changed, changed utterly, begins Michael Mandelbaum’s analysis of the international order since 1945. But he might have begun with a paraphrased quotation; perhaps, ”Nuclear weapons have changed the world. The point is to understand how.” For it is essentially his theme that the world passed at the moment of Hiroshima from one age to another, without its inhabitantsthen living, or those subsequently born, realizing how totally different was the new age from the old. His purpose is to confront the difference and bring it to life in the minds of his readers. His conclusion is that ”change,” in the Mamian sense, is over. It is indeed a supreme irony that the forces of production which Mam identified as leading ineluctably to proletarian revolution should, within a century of his death, have burdened mankind with artifacts that invest all major change within the industrial world with dangers too fearful to risk. But those whose approach to the social system is through military rather than economic factors have long thought-“long” being understood in a relative sense, for military analysts are latecomers to the community of ideas-that Mam quite underestimated the role that the sword, and the will to use it, plays in regulating human affairs. ”Ideas have lives and consequences of their own,” as Michael Mandelbaum reflects at the beginning of one of his sections. Revolution and economics, the one an event, the other a would-be science, were intellectually young when Mam was young, and their consequences-popular politics and the industrial revolution-seemed irresistible. It was therefore understandable that the enemies of economics and revolution-those who had not gone stiffnecked to the guillotine in 1793-should have looked, to the hot-blooded prophets of the future being preached in the 184Os, to be not merely beaten, but doomed to extinction. john Keegan is Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He is the author of The Face of Battle, and Editor of the Oxford Companion to Military History, and of World Armies. International Security, Winter 1981/82(Vol. 6,No.3)0162-2889/82/030195-12 $02.50/0 @ 1982by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 195 International Security I 196 Bankers and industrialists were the new lords of life, and would remain so until the masses rose to take their power from them. But the men of the sword were no more headed for extinction in the 1840s than at any other time in the world's bloody history. They were merely biding their moment, when a simple readiness to cut throats would make a joke of all the compound interest ever calculated and all the manifestoes ever printed. It would come erratically: in 1848in Prussia, in 1871 in France. But in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, it would appear to have returned for good. And the triumph of the 1917 Revolution in Russia would send its leaders scurrying to lock arms with the "military specialists" in an embrace not merely still unbroken, but now grown so tight that it is at times difficult to distinguish who is smothering whom. Neither Mam nor, of course, Engels ("the General") ever discounted the importance of military force. But both would surely look aghast at their "inevitable" revolution if they saw it hedged, scaffolded, and underpinned by the bayonets they had thought necessary only to precipitate it. Michael Mandelbaum, had he been writing a generation ago, might have thought it necessary to open with some such ideologicalclearing of the decks. It says something for the rise of strategic studies within universities, particularly universities like Harvard, during the last twenty years that he undertakes nothing of the kind. He accepts the primacy of force from the outset and directs himself immediately to considering how nuclear force, with its almost limitless dimensions, has influenced the internal politics of the states that yield it and transformed their relationships with each other. His method is an interesting one. He might, given his...