Security after the revolutions of 1989 and 1991: The future with nuclear weapons
- Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)
Political scientists typically view weapons within the realm of effects, not within the realm of cause. That is, weapons are a consequence of the great causal factors in international relations. Insecurity is the most important of these factors; it follows from the uneven distribution of power among states, the security dilemma, and the ever-present possibility that violence will be used to settle disagreements because there is no higher authority above states capable of enforcing rules. According to this logic weapons cause neither war nor peace. They are simply tools that states use to gain a share of the scarcest commodity - security - by fighting other states or by threatening to do so if necessary. Nuclear weapons are a product of great industrial capabilities, knowledge, and other resources. The United States and the Soviet Union had the largest arsenals of nuclear weapons because they were superpowers, not the other way around. On this logic, nuclear weapons reflect and reinforce a distribution of power that would exist in their absence. As the distribution of power among states changes, the status of nuclear weapons in the world will also change in a way that reflects the more fundamental causes that continue to drive state-state relationships in an anarchic world. In this chapter the author treat nuclears weapons within the realm of great causes. Arguing that nuclear weapons were a fundamental cause in bringing the Cold War, and with it the last vestiges of bipolarity, to an end. International life in the 1990s will not be the same as it was between 1945 and 1989. Will it be more like the multipolar world of the 1800s, with nuclear weapons simply grafted on the way other new weapons innovations have been in the past? That is not expected because nuclear weapons have altered the fundamental causal forces that drove previous international systems from peace to war and back again. 21 refs.
- OSTI ID:
- 105178
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 1992; Related Information: Is Part Of Nuclear weapons in the changing world: Perspectives from Europe, Asia, and North America; Garrity, P.J.; Maaranen, S.A. [eds.]; PB: 302 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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