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Mutual Assured Safety

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Abstract

In August 1990 Iraq suddenly invaded its neighbour, Kuwait. The United States found itself leading a broad-based coalition, sponsored by the United Nations in order to reverse the aggression. After sanctions and diplomacy had failed, armed force succeeded in Operation Desert Storm of early 1991. The timing and the character of this crisis meant that the ‘new world order’ proclaimed by President George H.W. Bush in September 1990 was influenced by old thinking.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    George H W Bush, ‘Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Persian Gulf Crisis and the Federal Budget Deficit’ (Washington DC: 11 September 1990).

  2. 2.

    Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

  3. 3.

    Jack Levy proclaimed ‘the absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations’. ‘Domestic Politics and War’, in Robert I Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds. The Origins and Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 88. For evaluations of the claims see Miriam Fendius Elman, ed. Paths to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).

  4. 4.

    Robert Kaplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy’, The Atlantic Monthly (February 1992).

  5. 5.

    Charles Glaser, ‘Nuclear Policy without Adversary.’ International Security, Spring (1992).

  6. 6.

    John Leppingwell, “Is Start Stalling?” in George Quester, ed. The Nuclear Challenges in Russia and the New States of Eurasia. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995). p. 103.

  7. 7.

    The first major study outlining these was K.M. Campbell et al., Soviet Nuclear Fission. Control of the Nuclear Arsenal in a Disintegrating Soviet Union (Cambridge MA: Center for Science and International Affairs, 1991). See also D. Isby, & T. Johnson, ‘Post-Soviet Nuclear Forces and the Risk of Accidental or Unauthorised Limited Nuclear Strikes’. Strategic Review, 21: 4 (Fall 1993). pp. 7–21. Oleg Bukharin ‘Nuclear Safeguards and Security in the Former Soviet Union’, Survival (Winter 1994–1995), pp. 53–72.

  8. 8.

    Milton Leitenberg, ‘The Hazards of Operations Involving Nuclear Weapons During the Cold War’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 20: 3 (Summer 2018), pp. 207–49.

  9. 9.

    For example, Bruce Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington DC: Brookings, 1993); Paul Douglas Feaver, Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Scott D Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). For a discussion see Bradley Thayer, ‘The Risk of Nuclear Inadvertence’, Security Studies, 111: 3 (Spring 1994), pp. 428–93 and subsequent responses.

  10. 10.

    Mueller, Atomic Obsession, pp. 206–10.

  11. 11.

    His efforts are described in a book he wrote with William J Perry, Secretary of Defense under Clinton, Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999. For an expenditure of $7 billion Washington helped deactivate some 5500 nuclear warheads and employed scientists who might have been getting up to mischief.

  12. 12.

    Peter Vincent Pry, War Scare: Russia and America on the Nuclear Brink (Westport CT: Praeger, 1999).

  13. 13.

    Jacob W Kipp, “Russia’s Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons.” Military Review. May-June 2001: pp. 27–38.

  14. 14.

    On this decay see William Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

  15. 15.

    Desmond Ball and Robert Toth, ‘Revising the SIOP: Taking War-Fighting to Dangerous Extremes,’ International Security 14 (Spring 1990), pp. 65–92.

  16. 16.

    Hans M. Kristensen and Joshua Handler, ‘The USA and Counter-proliferation: A New and Dubious Role for US Nuclear Weapons’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 27, No. 4, 1996, pp. 388–9.

  17. 17.

    The final version of the report was published in January 1992. Thomas C. Reed, At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), p. 290. See also: Hans M. Kristensen and Joshua Handler, ‘Changing Targets: Nuclear Doctrine from the Cold War to the Third World’, Greenpeace International, 1 March 1995 (Revised Version), p. 5.

  18. 18.

    For instance, this was the conclusion reached in the March 1992 Joint Military Assessment issued by the JCS.

  19. 19.

    Kristensen and Handler, pp. 10–15.

  20. 20.

    James C. Dao, ‘Senate Panel Votes to Lift Ban on Small Nuclear Arms’, The New York Times, May 10, 2003.

  21. 21.

    General George Lee Butler, Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention, Volume II The Transformative Years (Denver, CO: Outskirts Press Inc., 2016), pp. 141–4.

  22. 22.

    Ash Carter, John Steinbruner, and Charles Zraket, eds. Managing Nuclear Operations (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1987).

  23. 23.

    Tom Sauer, Nuclear Inertia: US Nuclear Weapons Policy After the Cold War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005).

  24. 24.

    On the Clinton period see Janne Nolan, An Elusive Consensus (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1999).

  25. 25.

    David Gompert, Kenneth Watman, and Dean Wilkening, “Nuclear first Use Revisited,” Survival 37 (Autumn 1995), pp. 27–44.

  26. 26.

    Scott D. Sagan, ‘The Commitment Trap: Why the United States Should Not Use Nuclear Threats to Deter Biological and Chemical Weapons Attacks’, International Security 24: 4 (Spring) (2000), pp. 85–115.

  27. 27.

    Nuclear Posture Review Report, Submitted to Congress on 31 December 2001. http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/policy/dod/npr.htm; New York Times, 10 March 2002, Economist, 16 March 2002.

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Correspondence to Lawrence Freedman .

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Freedman, L., Michaels, J. (2019). Mutual Assured Safety. In: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57350-6_37

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