Nuclear weapons have been a central fact of international politics since 1945 and have played a key role in the United States’ grand strategy ever since. But after almost eight decades is there anything more to be learned about nuclear weapons and their impact on US grand strategy? Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy provides an unequivocal answer. Yes, there is still a great deal to learn.

Francis J. Gavin presents a strong case that much of the conventional wisdom regarding nuclear weapons is at best incomplete; at worst, it is simply incorrect. These misunderstood aspects of nuclear statecraft include how nuclear deterrence actually works; whether nuclear coercion is effective; why the United States maintains a nuclear arsenal far larger and a nuclear force posture far more aggressive than required to deter an attack on its territory or the territories of major allies; why some technologically capable states actually developed independent nuclear arsenals while others refrained from the very pursuit, and while still others maintain an ambiguous posture between those two extremes; and, most importantly, whether nuclear proliferation makes the world safer or more dangerous.

Gavin is one of the most influential scholars in what Scott D. Sagan has called the “renaissance of nuclear security studies” (“Two Renaissances in Nuclear Security Studies,” H-Diplo/ISSF Forum: What We Talk about When We Talk about Nuclear Weapons, pp. 2–10, 2014). Gavin’s training as a historian, rather than as a political scientist, is important in at least two respects. First, it enables him to approach the vast IR literature on nuclear weapons—the deductive theories of nuclear deterrence, the numerous quantitative studies of nuclear crisis management and coercion, and policy-prescriptive works on the perils (and benefits) of nuclear proliferation—with a certain detachment. Second, Gavin’s historiography and familiarity with newly declassified archival materials on nuclear decision making in the United States and other countries during the Cold War enable him to identify new puzzles and to ask probing questions not only about the empirical support for existing theories but also about the balance between basic research and policy relevance.

Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy is a compilation of Gavin’s journal articles and book chapters over the past decade. Nonetheless, this book forms a cohesive whole. His coe argument is that nuclear weapons have had a profound and paradoxical impact on US grand strategy since the end of World War II. That strategy has had three coequal pillars: the containment of great power adversaries (such as the Soviet Union and, more recently, China and Russia), the maintenance of an open world economy, and the inhibition of nuclear proliferation (pp. 84–85).

Since the early 1950s, US nuclear statecraft has been a composite of several cross-cutting goals, which Gavin labels “multiple and interactive deterrence, assurance, and reassurance” or MIDAR. These include not only deterring other states—allies, adversaries, and neutrals—from acquiring their own independent nuclear forces but also assuring allies that the United States would neither abandon them nor drag them into unwanted conflicts; reassuring adversaries that Washington would deter and restrain its own allies; reassuring all parties that its nuclear posture was not oriented toward first-strike capabilities, even as the United States sought nuclear primacy; and, finally, maintaining the capabilities to defeat adversaries without recourse to nuclear weapons use. Although policy makers and strategists in Washington adopted these cross-cutting goals and components during the Cold War, they have remained essentially unchanged over the succeeding 30 years. Consequently, Gavin disputes the idea of a first nuclear age that coincided with the Cold War and ended with the Soviet Union’s collapse and a second nuclear age defined by threats such as a nuclear-armed North Korea and a nuclear-latent Iran (p. 145).

The renaissance in nuclear studies, Gavin argues, has enriched our understanding of nuclear weapons in at least three respects. First, we nowknow more about nuclear decision making in a variety of states, including Brazil, Germany, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Pakistan, Romania, South Korea, Sweden, and Taiwan. Second, it has led to a deeper and more nuanced picture of the range of nuclear proliferation activities these states pursued. The binary distinction between “nuclear-armed” or “non-nuclear” state is insufficient. “Terms such as recessed deterrent, threshold state, nuclear reversal, latency, hedging, and opacity describe what might be thought of as spectrum of outcomes that are historically and politically short of a full-blown survivable nuclear deterrent” (p. 2; emphasis in the original). Third, new scholarship demonstrates the extent to which the United States attempted to slow, halt, or reverse nuclear weapons development by adversaries, as well as by allies and neutral states. For example, these findings call into question the conventional wisdom about the origins of the nuclear nonproliferation regime by showing the extent of collaboration between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s.

Gavin is critical of the nuclear (or thermonuclear) revolution school—a body of theories associated with the writings of Kenneth N. Waltz, Robert Jervis, Charles Glaser, Stephen Van Evera, and, earlier, Bernhard Brodie, Thomas C. Schelling, and Morton Halperin, among others. Most of these scholars created deductive theories, and in fairness, none had access to then-classified documents. Although this literature underpinned much of the scholarly conventional wisdom about nuclear weapons, the various hypotheses and policy prescriptions derived from it were often at odds with the types of nuclear behavior the United States actually exhibits.

For example, the advent of mutual assured destruction (MAD) in the 1960s did not produce strategic stability, as some nuclear revolution proponents expected. Instead, both superpowers remained obsessed with achieving quantitative (in the case of the Soviet Union) or qualitative (in the case of the United States) superiority over the other. Likewise, the argument that the United States developed and maintained nuclear weapons to deter a possible attack or invasion of its homeland belies the fact that no adversary has ever had the capabilities to launch an invasion of North America in the first place. If nuclear weapons were only useful as a strategic deterrent and if a world of more nuclear armed states would be better, as Waltz famously argued, then why have successive presidential administrations contemplated preventive military action to forestall various adversaries—the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran—from acquiring such weapons? Moreover, why did successive US presidential administrations go to such great lengths to thwart nuclear proliferation by allies like the Federal Republic of Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan, employing a range of strategies—legal-normative, coercive, and assurance?

Gavin admits that his MIDAR framework is a heuristic, rather than an explanatory theory. He writes, “The main point of the framework is to reveal that the way the United States incorporates nuclear weapons into its overall grand strategy goes well beyond the basic ideas of deterrence against invasion and conquest highlighted by the early nuclear strategists and embraced by most nuclear weapons states” (p. 130). However, this also points to a shortcoming of the MIDAR framework. If, as Gavin argues, “strategies of inhibition” have been a consistent pillar of US grand strategy for seven decades, then what might account for variation in the pursuit of those strategies toward allies and neutral states across time and across different geographic regions? He admits, “West Germany’s potential nuclearization was, because of its history and geopolitical situation, in a category all by itself” and that the Soviet Union’s opposition to that possibility “was the driving issue behind the great crisis period of 1958–1962—and by 1963, the United States agreed” (p. 120).

But, in the Middle East, the containment and nonproliferation objectives actually came into conflict. By the mid-1960s, the Johnson administration became willing to sell advanced conventional arms to Israel, despite misgivings about its clandestine nuclear weapons program, in an effort to forestall the growth of Soviet influence in the region. The Nixon administration went further, selling Israel nuclear-capable bombers (the F-4 Phantoms) and tacitly acknowledging its nuclear-armed status, in exchange for Prime Minister Golda Meir’s pledge not to conduct nuclear tests or make public declarations about its nuclear status.

Likewise, Gavin’s contention that the United States threatened allies with abandonment to dissuade them from developing an independent nuclear capability is disputable. For example, the proliferation disputes with South Korea and Taiwan in the 1970s were the unintended consequence of the Nixon administration’s pursuit of three objectives: extricating US forces from the Vietnam War, reducing US troop levels throughout East and Southeast Asia, and seeking a rapprochement with China to enlist it as an ally of convenience against the Soviet Union. Fear of possible abandonment prompted South Korea’s president Park Chung Hee and Taiwan’s premier (later president) Chiang Ching-kou to authorize clandestine nuclear weapons programs. The Ford and Carter administrations did use a mixture of assurance and coercive diplomacy to thwart South Korean and Taiwanese nuclear proliferation. That said, the coercive elements were limited to threats to suspend civil-nuclear energy cooperation with Seoul and Taipei. There is little documentary evidence to suggest that officials in either administration directly threatened to suspend conventional arms transfers or cut bilateral security ties to force the termination of the nascent South Korean and Taiwanese nuclear weapons programs. Issuing such abandonment threats would have been self-defeating for US policy makers.