Nuclear Issues

Matthew Evangelista examines the precedents and possibilities for postwar European security in an interview with International Security Executive Editor Jacqueline L. Hazelton.

In recent years, a concerted effort has been made to build up and delineate a discipline of applied history. But there has been little discussion about what applied history is, how the discipline navigates a range of epistemological problems, and how applied history is distinct from other disciplines that use historical data and attend to matters of policy—particularly political science. This article considers some of these questions with respect to two common methods of applied history: analogy and genealogy.

Calder Walton says both seek to topple the United States from atop world stage, with China's blend of money, influence, all-hands-on-deck approach posing the greater threat.

Scott Sagan asked Joseph S. Nye to revisit Nuclear Ethics, a book he published in 1986, in light of current developments in world affairs. In doing so, he found that much had changed but the basic usability paradox of nuclear deterrence remains the same. 

Joseph Nye argues that prudence results from the fear of creating unintended consequences in unpredictable systems and can develop into a norm of nonuse or limited use of certain weapons or a norm of limiting targets. Something like this happened with nuclear weapons when the superpowers came close to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The Limited Test Ban Treaty followed a year later.

Nathaniel Moir reviews Maxwell Taylor's Cold War: From Berlin to Vietnam by Ingo Trauschweizer.

In his new book, Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump, Joseph S. Nye developed a scorecard to determine how U.S. presidents since 1945 factored questions of ethics and morality into their foreign policy. In an interview, Henry Farrell asked him a few questions to get to the heart of his findings.

The study of existential risk — the risk of human extinction or the collapse of human civilization — has only recently emerged as an integrated field of research, and yet an overwhelming volume of relevant research has already been published. To provide an evidence base for policy and risk analysis, this research should be systematically reviewed. In a systematic review, one of many time-consuming tasks is to read the titles and abstracts of research publications, to see if they meet the inclusion criteria. The authors show how this task can be shared between multiple people (using crowdsourcing) and partially automated (using machine learning), as methods of handling an overwhelming volume of research.

The arguments in favor of the United States' declaring that the only purpose of its nuclear weapons is to deter others who possess them from using theirs — in other words, that in no circumstances will this country use nuclear weapons first — are far stronger than the arguments against this stance. It must be hoped that the next US administration will take this no-first-use step promptly.