Comment: Impact on nuclear weapons on international relations. (1991, 20 Marks)
Within months of Hiroshima, Bernard Brodie wrote in The Absolute Weapon (1946) that the chief purpose of military establishments must now be to avert wars rather than win them. That sentence sums up the nuclear revolution. Nuclear weapons changed the purpose of force, the structure of the international system and the norms of statecraft, though not always in the direction their defenders claim.
Strategy: from victory to deterrence
- Deterrence by punishment. Force is now valued for the damage it threatens. Thomas C. Schelling (Arms and Influence, 1966) called this “the power to hurt” used as bargaining power: strategy became the management of risk.
- Second strike and MAD. Albert Wohlstetter’s “delicate balance of terror” (1959) showed that stability depends on forces that can survive attack. This led to mutual assured destruction, triads and hardened command.
- Arms control. Adversaries cooperated to manage the danger: the hotline and Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963), SALT and the ABM Treaty (1972), the INF Treaty (1987) and START I, signed in July 1991.
The international system
- The long peace. John Lewis Gaddis and Kenneth N. Waltz credit nuclear weapons with keeping the Cold War cold. Catastrophic costs made leaders cautious and reinforced bipolar stability; no two nuclear powers have fought a major war. Robert Jervis (The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, 1989) argued that the weapons make victory between nuclear powers impossible. John Mueller (1988) dissented: memories of conventional war and satisfied great powers would have kept the peace anyway.
- Hierarchy. The NPT (1968) gave legal form to a two-tier order of five recognised weapon states and everyone else. India rejected it as discriminatory, and Jawaharlal Nehru’s disarmament diplomacy turned into India’s long refusal to sign.
- Status. The bomb became a currency of prestige as well as security, which helps explain proliferation to nine states.
Conflict moves below the threshold
Glenn H. Snyder’s stability–instability paradox holds that nuclear stability makes lower-level conflict safer. Superpower rivalry shifted to proxy wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Angola. In South Asia, Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella sheltered Kargil and cross-border terrorism, while India answered with conventional strikes at Balakot (2019) and in Operation Sindoor (May 2025).
Norms and their critics
- Constructivists. Nina Tannenwald explains eighty years of non-use as a nuclear taboo, a norm that makes use illegitimate and not just imprudent. The TPNW (in force 2021) carries that humanitarian reasoning forward.
- Organisational critics. Scott D. Sagan points to accidents, false alarms and near-misses such as the 1962 Cuban crisis and the 1983 Soviet false warning: deterrence rests on fallible organisations.
- Feminist critics. Carol Cohn (1987) showed how defence intellectuals’ abstract language makes mass killing seem thinkable.
- Global South critics. They see deterrence as a privilege of the strong, upheld by a regime that disarms only the weak. India argued this from Nehru’s 1954 call for a halt to testing to Rajiv Gandhi’s time-bound Action Plan at the UN (1988).
The present test
The system is again under strain. SIPRI counts about 12,187 warheads (January 2026). New START expired on 5 February 2026 with no successor. China’s arsenal of about 620 warheads is turning a two-power balance into a three-body problem. The 2026 NPT Review Conference ended without agreement for the third time in a row. Russian nuclear signalling over Ukraine and the June 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites show both coercion and counter-proliferation by force.
Conclusion
Nuclear weapons have made great-power war irrational without making conflict obsolete. They froze hierarchy, pushed violence to the periphery, and produced both the taboo and the arms race. Their main effect is restraint resting on fear: it has held since 1945, but its breakdown is the one failure no one could afford.