Preface

      Although writing a book about the meaning of nuclear weapons has been in the back of my mind for years, I always hesitated about starting the project. A fair part of that reticence reflected the fact that much of what follows here could not have been written even a decade ago: not only did I think differently then about nuclear weapons during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, but there was much that we simply did not yet know (and still do not know) about the making of nuclear policies in the United States and the former Soviet Union. Nonetheless, I knew that the issues in this book have been coloring many of the other problems I’ve studied over the years. Whether writing about Soviet civil-military politics as I did at the start of my career, or considering the advent of a new international age of preventive war as I did in my most recent work, the use of nuclear weapons and the possibility of nuclear war were constant companions to the questions I was investigating.

      Paradoxically, I nonetheless avoided writing specifically about nuclear weapons for quite some time, because the implications of their use are so complicated and immense that they tend to swamp all other conclusions about anything else. The new reality, for example, that the United States and other nations now think much more permissively about preventive war—that is, attacking other nations far in advance of an actual threat—logically raises the question of whether anyone would use nuclear weapons in such preventive attacks. But to focus on that possibility in the larger discussion of preventive war risks placing the momentous but slight possibility of nuclear use at the center of what should be a larger discussion about the use of any kind of force. Once we start to think about nuclear bombs going off, it gets a little harder to think about anything else.

      I also shied away from a project on nuclear weapons because I did not want my work to be overly influenced by my own experiences coming of age in the shadow of global nuclear war. (Whether I’ve succeeded will be up to the reader, of course.) As I’ve written elsewhere, I grew up in an Air Force town that was home to a major Strategic Air Command nuclear bomber base. Like many communities that hosted the American nuclear deterrent, we didn’t like to think much about the weapons that were sitting up the road at the base, but we knew they were there and what that meant for us in the event of a war. The Cold War did not end until I was thirty, and until then I had never known anything but a world that was, at least to me, defined by the standoff with the USSR and kept at peace only by the protective shield of American nuclear power. While I was somewhat more comfortable writing about nuclear history, as I did in the late 1990s, I am not certain that I could have written about the future of nuclear weapons while I was still so close to their past.

      As the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall approached, however, I finally decided to study and write about nuclear weapons directly rather than by implication. I presumed that I knew my way around these issues, and that my thinking was mostly settled. At the least, I felt reasonably well equipped to tackle modern nuclear strategy: I had spent years studying the Soviet Union and Russia, worked in both the private and public sector on both nuclear and conventional military issues, and taught strategy and national security affairs in a military institution.

      As I began writing the book, I quickly realized I was mistaken. First, I found that any approach to the study of nuclear issues required relearning the history of the Cold War. Although I had experienced it and had to some extent participated in it, like many other scholars of international relations I felt swamped by the revelations and new knowledge that became available only after the Cold War’s end. These new histories showed how deeply the Soviets