The case for U.S. nuclear weapons in the 21st century

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Notes

1. Brad Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), p. 9.

2. Ibid., p. 2.

3. Ibid., p. 3

4. Ibid., p. 256.

5. Ibid., p. 17.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., p. 49.

8. Ibid., p. 48.

9. Ibid., p. 248.

10. Ibid., p. 262. Article VI of the NPT commits the parties to the treaty ‘to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament …’. See SIPRI, The NPT: The Main Political Barrier to Nuclear Weapon Proliferation (London: Taylor and Francis, 1980), p. 45. The American nuclear arsenal is significantly smaller than during the Cold War, but the Obama administration has approved an ambitious nuclear modernization programme that envisages spending $355 billion dollars over the next decade. See William J. Broad and David Sanger, ‘U.S. Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms’, New York Times, 21 September 2014.

11. Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons, p. 262.

12. Ibid., pp. 236–37.

13. See Liviu Horovitz and Robert Golan-Vilella, ‘Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty: How the Dominoes Might Fall after U.S. Ratification’, Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 17, No. 2 (July 2010), p. 238.

14. Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons, p. 254.

15. Ibid., p. 243.

16. ‘Red theory of victory’ is a shorthand ‘to express a generic, adversarial set of concepts’ about the strategic thinking of potential US adversaries (for example, North Korea, Russia, China) that would allow them to practice nuclear blackmail and brinkmanship in order to prevail if war with the USA proves unavoidable. See Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons, pp. 6, 53.

17. Ibid., pp. 96–104.

18. Ibid., p. 7.

19. Ibid., p. 96.

20. ‘Remarks by President Barack Obama’, Prague, Czech Republic, 5 April 2009. See also Aiden Warren, ‘The Promises of Prague Versus Nuclear Realities: From Bush to Obama’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 32, No. 2 (August 2011), pp. 432–57.

21. Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons, p. 235.

22. Ibid., p. 97.

23. Ibid., p. 205.

24. Ibid., p. 98.

25. Ibid., pp. 99–101.

26. Ibid., pp. 94–6, 105.

27. Ibid., p. 101.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., p. 103.

30. See, for example, Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), chap. 1. As Ross puts it, ‘If there is to be war, today, as in the past, the most effective way to limit it in what remains a nuclear age is to refrain from the use of nuclear weapons’. Andrew L. Ross, ‘The Origins of Limited Nuclear War Theory’, in Jeffrey A. Larsen and Kerry M. Kartchner (eds), On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), p. 42.

31. Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 398.

32. Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons, p. 69.

33. Ibid., p. 101.

34. Ibid., pp. 203–4.

35. Ibid., p. 172.

36. Ibid., pp. 170–1.

37. Ibid., p. 175.

38. Ibid., pp. 224–7.

39. Ibid., pp. 261–3.

40. ‘The “nuclear taboo” refers to a powerful de facto prohibition against the first use of nuclear weapons. The taboo is not the behavior (of non-use) itself but rather the normative belief about the behavior’. Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-use of Nuclear Weapons since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 10 (italics in the original). The ‘nuclear taboo’ is a particular type of international social norm, that is, ‘a shared expectation about behavior, a standard of right or wrong’. Ibid.

41. Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons, p. 260.

42. Ibid., p. 263.

43. Ibid., p. 239.

44. Ibid., p. 271.

45. Ibid., p. 248.

46. See ibid., p. 247.

47. Ibid., p. 261.

48. See ibid., pp. 257–61.

49. See Richard K. Betts, ‘Is Strategy an Illusion?’, International Security, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Fall 2000), p. 5.

50. Ibid.

51. Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons, p. 71.

52. See, for example, Larsen and Kartchner (eds), On Limited Nuclear War.

53. McGeorge Bundy, ‘To Cap the Volcano’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 48, No. 1 (October 1969). Quoted in Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons, p. 70.

54. See Stanley Hoffmann, The State of War: Essays on the Theory and Practice of International Politics (New York: Praeger, 1965), p. 236.

55. Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons, p. 71.

56. Ibid., p. 241.