Abstract
To suggest that the development of a balance of terror since the Second World War has probably been inevitable is not to suggest that a balance of terror will necessarily remain inevitable for the rest of time. There is no a priori reason why two superpowers on a single planet should continue indefinitely, and at huge expense, to maintain the means of obliterating each other’s main centres of population several times over.
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Notes and References
This chapter owes much to distinguished lecturers and colleagues at the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1979, including Lord Brimelow, Sir Terence Garvey, John Wilberforce and Michael Llewellyn Smith.
Quoted in Bernard Brodie, Escalation and the Nuclear Option (Princeton University Press, 1960) p.44.
Reproduced in the IISS’s Survival, May/June 1976, p.126.
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© 1986 A.J.C. Edwards
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Edwards, A.J.C. (1986). Is It Necessary?. In: Nuclear Weapons, the Balance of Terror, the Quest for Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08131-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08131-8_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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