Rethinking Nuclear History

Scholars of international politics have struggled to disentangle the international history of the post–World War II era from the history of the nuclear age with which it has been coterminus. They have debated, without reaching any degree of consensus, the causal links that might obtain between the advent of weapons of unparalleled destructive power and the abrupt cessation of armed conflict among the great powers. In the most intellectually ambitious and wide-ranging of the books under review here, Francis J. Gavin pointedly asks: “Has the creation and spread of nuclear weapons decreased, if not eliminated, the prospect of great power wars of the type that killed tens of millions of people in the first half of the twentieth century? If so, how and under what conditions?” (p. 28). In an even broader sense, he asks: “Are such weapons stabilizing or destabilizing, and under what circumstances?” (p. 5).

Gavin’s slim but incisive volume addresses an additional set of core questions about the impact of nuclear weapons on international affairs. To what extent, he wonders, have initiatives aimed at limiting the number of nuclear-armed states succeeded? To what degree, if any, have those nonproliferation efforts enhanced global security? Why have some nations run extraordinary risks to develop nuclear weapons while others have consciously rejected that option, and still others, such as South Africa, have actually destroyed existing stockpiles of nuclear warheads? An overhanging puzzle concerns the exact value we should attach to possessing these ultimate instruments of mass destruction. “Are nuclear weapons only useful for defensive or deterrent purposes,” Gavin speculates, “or can they be used for offensive ends, or in order to revise the international order?” (p. 28). And what does history reveal about the utility of arms control negotiations? Have nuclear arms agreements imparted stability and order to the international system, or, as critics charge, fallen well short of that goal?

Those complex questions, whether implicitly or explicitly, lie at the very heart of the now vast scholarly literature exploring the complex interrelationship between nuclear weapons and international politics. The precise nature of that interrelationship, in light of current controversies surrounding the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran, could not be more topical. Yet most historians have come at this subject only indirectly: most commonly by examining a particular flash point, such as the Berlin or Cuban missile crises, or a specific theme, such as arms control or the nuclear nonproliferation regime. The books by Sheldon M. Stern and Sergo Mikoyan, each focused on the gravest—and most extensively studied—nuclear showdown in history, continue in that tradition. Far fewer historians have tackled the broader interpretive issues that animate Gavin’s provocative study. Indeed, our discipline has largely ceded the wider theoretical terrain to nuclear strategists. Yet, as Gavin rightly complains, those big-picture analysts have produced deceptively elegant theories that often rest upon serious misunderstandings of the actual historical record.

Considered together, Nuclear Statecraft, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, and The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis display many of the strengths—as well as some of the limitations—of the wider historical literature on nuclear weapons and foreign policy. All three authors bring rich documentary evidence to bear on their attempts to correct certain aspects of what they separately decry as the deeply flawed conventional wisdom about their respective subjects. For Gavin, that means challenging the prevailing axioms developed by the nuclear theorists and policy advocates whose work has dominated this field of inquiry. For Stern, that means demolishing the myths...