Review essay: the nuclear curse
| Author | Richard Ned Lebow |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221094726 |
| Published date | 01 March 2023 |
| Date | 01 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Review Essay |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221094726
International Relations
2023, Vol. 37(1) 180 –198
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178221094726
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Review essay: the nuclear curse
Richard Ned Lebow
King’s College London
Abstract
The five books under review address nuclear weapons and the risk of war during the Cold War.
Four of the five contend this risk was higher than understood by policymakers at the time or many
scholars in its aftermath. They attribute this risk to strategic alerts, close encounters of opposing
forces in crisis, and lack of access to critical intelligence. They consider the superpowers to have
emerged unscathed from the Cuban missile crisis as much due to luck as leader commitments to
avoid war. I interrogate the concept of “luck” and use my analysis to evaluate these arguments.
Keywords
accidents, Cuban missile crisis, deterrence, escalation, luck, nuclear weapons, risk, uncertainty
Martin Sherwin, Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the
Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Knopf, 2020), pp. xi + 604.
Fred Kaplan, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), pp. 372.
Serhii Plokhy, Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton,
2021), pp. 464.
Benoît Pelopidas, Repenser les choix nucléaires (Paris: SciencesPo Les Presses, 2022),
pp. 306.
Theodore Voorhees, The Silent Guns of Two Octobers: Kennedy and Khrushchev Play
the Double Game, rev. ed. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2021), p. 380.
The Cold War ended three decades ago and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Euphoria
was short-lived. As the threat of nuclear war receded, that of environmental catastrophe
looms larger. Now there is talk of another Cold War – or worse still, cold wars, between
the West and China and the West and Russia. There is renewed interest in nuclear weapons
Corresponding author:
Richard Ned Lebow, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, UK.
Email: Richard.Lebow@kcl.ac.uk
1094726IRE0010.1177/00471178221094726International RelationsLebow
review-article2022
Review Essay
Lebow 181
and their delivery systems and talk of the advantages of military superiority and even of
the possibility of using nuclear threats and weapons to achieve political ends – all of this
despite public recognition by the governments of the U.S., Russia, U.K., France, and
China that nuclear war is unwinnable and that everything in their power should be done to
avoid one.1 Once again, however, some officials and intellectuals claim that deterrence is
failing, advocate new weapons and strategic superiority, and war plans that rest on the
assumption that a great power conflict could be kept limited. All of these countries are
upgrading their arsenals and the U.S. once again refused to disavow the first use of nuclear
weapons despite a large public campaign toward this end.2 The concern for nuclear war
has risen considerably since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Those who advocate new weapons and design strategies for their possible use are
oblivious to some of the principal lessons of the Cold War. That conflict revealed that
minimal deterrence works because leaders almost everywhere are horrified by the pros-
pect of nuclear war; that the quest for strategic advantage and bellicose rhetoric is more
likely to provoke than restrain adversaries; that crises between nuclear powers are riskier
than supposed because of the difficulty of preventing undesired and unanticipated esca-
lation; and that the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis – the most acute confrontation
of the Cold War – was due perhaps as much to luck as political skill. Four of the five
books under review advocate all or some of these lessons and offer evidence and rea-
soned argument in support of them.
The fifth book – Vorhees’ The Silent Guns – stands out for its downplaying risk in the
missile crisis and dismissing altogether the possibility of the unwanted use of nuclear
weapons. Its arguments are unconvincing and often little more than assertions not backed
by any evidence and not informed by evidence to the contrary. I include the Vorhees book
in my essay because it has been taken seriously elsewhere and gives voice and support to
those in military and think tanks who pursue policies and goals that we now know to be
dangerous and contrary to any country’s national interest.3
All of these books – Vorhees included – take positions on questions of risk, uncer-
tainty, and luck and use them to assess the wisdom of Cold War policies and strategies.
They devote special attention to the Cuban missile crisis in this regard, although Sherwin,
Kaplan, and Plokhy offer a broader narrative accounts of nuclear weapons, nuclear strat-
egy, and nuclear crises during the Cold War. Pelopidas does so as well but organizes his
book around conceptual categories. I review and evaluate their arguments and conclude
with some thoughts about risk, uncertainty, and luck. Overall, I argue that we need a
more elaborate framing of these concepts to develop a better understanding of their role
in the Cold War and in conflicts more generally
Martin Sherwin died in October 2021. His research centered on nuclear questions. He
was coauthor of a prize-winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), and author
of World Destroyed (1975), about Hiroshima and its legacies. He was a Lieutenant in the
Navy during the missile crisis, an event that piqued his interest in the subject. Gambling
with Armageddon was his final book and is a fitting legacy. Sherwin offers an account of
Soviet-American relations and nuclear weapons from Hiroshima to the missile crisis. He
argues that the drawbacks of nuclear weapons far outweigh any of their putative benefits.
The atomic bomb helped to end World War II, but Japan would have surrendered soon in
its absence. America’s short-lived nuclear monopoly offered no real political advantages,
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