Questions such as these kept busy generations of nuclear strategists and led them to develop a substantial literature. Although this was largely concerned with the U.S.-Soviet relationship, the literature nonetheless was often abstract and theoretical, trying to work out what rational actors might do in hypothetical nuclear predicaments before worrying what the actual states involved might do. At the same time, because much appeared to depend on the hardness of concrete shelters or the accuracy of a missile warhead, this high theory had to be combined with some quite technical analyses of the properties of particular weapons. And then there was always the political dimension, concerned with the tenability of alliances and the dynamics of crisis management, followed by demands to come up with sensible proposals for force structure and arms control negotiations.

By such processes do simple problems become complicated. The deterrence industry grew even as the superpower relationship itself stabilized. The stability was the result of the practice being a lot simpler than the theory. Politicians understood the essential point. If you were going to risk nuclear war, you had to be really sure of your calculations. The consequences of getting it wrong were huge, and the inherent uncertainties were substantial; prudence was always the order of the day. This was especially so after the tense moments over Berlin and Cuba in the early 1960s.

The problem of deterrence for lesser nuclear powers appeared to be far less demanding. Robert McNamara, when Secretary of Defense, claimed that small nuclear forces would be “dangerous, expensive, prone to obsolescence and lacking in credibility as a deterrent.” Either he was right, in which case the disincentives to getting into the nuclear business would be profound, or he was wrong, in which case proliferation could be expected as more states concluded that at quite modest numbers a nuclear deterrent could be both survivable and useful.

Avery Goldstein, who takes the second of these views, considers the Cold War experience of China, Britain, and France and judges its relevance for the post–Cold War world. He examines not only the rationales for their acquisition of nuclear forces but also what they thought was necessary to achieve their deterrent purposes. He finds that they felt able to do this without attempting to match the exacting standards set by the United States and the Soviet Union, at least so long as they were limited in their ambitions and confined themselves to preserving the status quo. The trouble is that in developing this position goldstein demonstrates himself to be a complicator. There appears to be not a single issue of deterrence theory that he does not attempt to address, and he even includes his own little “expected utility model.” The result is a dense read, with the more interesting material often tucked away in footnotes, and few general propositions are reached on the viability of alternative deterrence strategies that are not context-dependent.

Fortunately, Goldstein also seeks to develop his argument through case studies. His previous book was on China, and by far the best sections of this book are those that deal with the history of China's nuclear force. He is on top of all the best scholarship on Chinese foreign policy, from the entry into the Korean War to the Sino-Soviet dispute and the opening to the United States, and he has interesting things to say on why the force structure took the form it did. The case studies of France and Britain are less successful. Goldstein's neorealist position leads him to argue that the core motive behind acquisition was the lack of confidence in a superpower protector. That has some validity with France, as with China, but for Britain that is a much smaller part of the story. Of course the “standing alone” scenario was part of the rationale, but the basic impulse behind Britain's nuclear capability was, first, its initial status as one of the “big three” and indeed as the first country to demonstrate the possibility of a nuclear bomb and, second, its constant belief that a national nuclear capability provided an entrée into American policymaking.

Whether these three cases tell us much about the future is unclear. One might have thought the Israeli, Indian, and Pakistani cases, to which Goldstein devotes a few pages, are more relevant. As for future proliferation he points to the importance of the degree of insecurity afflicting individual states, the availability of nonnuclear means of addressing such insecurity as does exist, and the economic and technical capacity to develop the nuclear option. Goldstein's candidates are those that neorealists identified just after the end of the Cold War—Germany, Japan, and Ukraine—although in none of these cases is a military nuclear program on the immediate political agenda. The candidates that most bother American politicians—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—are dealt with only in a cursory manner.

The underlying philosophy appears to be an expectation that the international system might one day conform to a neorealist model, that is, return to the great power politics of the old days, and then governments might be very grateful for any nuclear insurance that they had taken out. This indicates the basic problem with the title. Of course, the nuclear revolution remains important, and who knows what challenges might develop in the future, but to understand deterrence and security in the twenty-first century it is necessary to make sense of ways in which the state system is already changing; new forms of insecurity are developing, and therefore new forms of deterrence are required. This book is welcome for the historical analyses of the smaller nuclear powers but, contrary to the title, has nothing to say about security and deterrence in the twenty-first century, other than to suggest that it may be like the twentieth century.