Does the Nuclear Arms Race Matter?

Abstract

In The Nuclear Seduction: Why the Arms Race Doesn't Matter - and What Does, William A. Schwartz and Charles Derber present a provocative critique of the near universal assumption that the nuclear arms race represents the main danger of nuclear war. Despite the obsession with the technological characteristics of weaponry by peace movements, arms controllers and nuclear hawks alike, what is called `weaponitis', the authors contend that short of near-total nuclear disarmament changes in the arms race cannot significantly affect the likelihood or the effects of nuclear war. The real danger of nuclear war, documented in seventeen case studies covering the entire postwar period, lies in superpower intervention and regional conflicts around the world. The cases indicate that during Cold War crises the risks of miscalculation, accidental use of nuclear weapons, and unanticipated dangers leading to nuclear conflict have often been much greater than commonly assumed. The book concludes with a critique of the politics of arms control, and calls for development of a peace movement which has a broader, political vision of the requirements for peace, rather than one reacting defensively to the endless, yet in the authors' view relatively insignificant, threats of technology. The Nuclear Seduction makes a strong case that there is a `deadly connection' between superpower intervention or regional conflict and the possibility of nuclear war. The book is not successful, however, in demonstrating a necessary dichotomy between the politics of opposition to the arms race and the politics of anti-intervention. In synthesizing as well as challenging much of the recent literature on the arms race and nuclear danger, The Nuclear Seduction makes a major, and what many will find controversial, contribution to both scholarly and political discourse.