Throughout the decades of the Cold War, people all around the world
lived in fear of thermonuclear war. To assuage that fear theorists
of deterrence explained over and over again that both sides had to
be able to retaliate with "mutual assured destruction", to keep
nuclear weapons from being used. Yet this "basic fact" of nuclear
deterrence begs the question. What deterred the United States from
a preemptive strike before 1949 when Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union
had not yet acquired nuclear weapons of its own? In Nuclear
Monopoly George Quester sets forth the case for preventive war
using rudimentary atomic weapons to avoid the possibility of a
future war in which both sides would have used hydrogen bombs.
Quester demonstrates that the notion of mutual assured
destruction was rooted in the questionable assumption that assured
destruction must be mutual and that the United States "of course"
would never consider preventive war. He explores the logic of these
assumptions against the historical circumstances of the years
1945-1949 and the thinking of influential personalities and
decision-makers that determined U.S. nuclear policy. In 1945 the
United States was able to inflict nuclear destruction and had no
fear of retaliation. Arguably the United States could have used
that advantage to extract major political concessions from the
Soviet Union, including surrender, disarmament, and
democratization. At the same time it might have prevented the
proliferation and development of nuclear weapons. Against this view
Quester analyzes a range of prevailing views from practical and
procedural considerations. These range from the shortage of bombs
and other resources, ineffectiveness of bombing,Soviet resistance,
and the vulnerability of Western Europe, to larger questions of
American morality: absence of a casus belli, civilian casualties,
and concern about untrammeled arrogance of power.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the proliferation
of nuclear weapons among small powers and rogue states, the failure
to head off Soviet nuclear capacity takes on greater historical
weight. The options of the next century will never be what they
were from 1945 to 1949, but this study of the military and
strategic decision making provides important insights for future
conflicts. Nuclear Monopoly will be of interest to military
historians, policymakers, and political scientists.
General
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