Posturing the Bomb

Abstract

Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict. By Vipin Narang. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. 341 pp., $29.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-691-15983-6). Vipin Narang's Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era is the best political science book published on nuclear strategy in more than two decades. This is mostly because it is an excellent book and partly because nuclear strategy has not received the attention it deserves in recent years. During the Cold War, International Relations (IR) scholars flocked to questions of nuclear deterrence, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s, classic works on the subject were published by leading lights, such as Richard Betts (⇓), Charles Glaser (⇓), Robert Jervis (⇓), Robert Powell (⇓), and others. For better or worse, however, the scholarly study of IR tends to follow real-world events, and following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War scholarship on nuclear deterrence slowed to a trickle. The United States principal foes, such as Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Libya, did not possess nuclear weapons, and The United States nuclear forces were of little utility against the unconventional challenges these adversaries posed. Policymakers certainly worried about nuclear proliferation to rogue states and terrorist networks, and scholars continued to design rigorous research to analyze these questions, but traditional questions of nuclear deterrence and strategy remained overlooked. In the real world, however, the specter of nuclear confrontation is reemerging. The United States adversaries, including North Korea and Russia, have moved nuclear weapons to the center of their national security strategies, in part as an effort to offset The United States conventional military dominance. India and Pakistan are engaging in the most intense arms race the world has seen since the end of the Cold War, and Iran appears determined to earn admission into the club of nuclear …