What is the nuclear revolution? We can start with an uncontroversial definition: beginning in the 1950s, and continuing on to the present day, the United States and the Soviet Union (and now Russia and other nations) have deployed weapons that, if used in a major war, are capable of destroying its belligerents beyond social and political recognition and exterminating much of the human race. This has never been possible before and so, by itself, constitutes a revolutionary development by anyone's reckoning. Brendan Rittenhouse Green, the author of the fine book under review here, does not disagree with that.

The disputes begin when it comes to the implications of this development. Does it mean that major war between large nuclear powers has become unwinnable and absurd? The common-sense answer to this question is “yes.” Ronald Reagan's one-word description of those who thought a nuclear war was winnable—“crazy”—summarizes this position nicely.

There is, however, a growing number of scholars who suggest otherwise. One argument, focused on the present, points to the development of new technologies and weapons that could permit the United States to take out the entire Russian arsenal, not to mention those of smaller nuclear powers.

A second argument, focused on the past, contends that during the Cold War both superpowers did not accept the idea that war was unwinnable and so developed new strategies and weapon systems that could permit them to win World War III. This is an important historical contention, because the conventional wisdom—the Cold War plainly showed that no one is ever going to start a nuclear war—suggests that the technological innovations the United States is working on today are pointless. Why spend billions to prepare for a war nobody will ever start? But if the conventional wisdom is wrong, it might make sense to upgrade. This is how the two “counter revolutionary” arguments are tied together.

The standard narrative goes like this. The two superpowers first developed their revolutionary weapons in the 1950s, and although it took them a few years and a couple of terrifying crises to figure things out, after the Cuban Missile Crisis they realized that major war was off the table. Cold War leaders after 1962 thus accepted the condition of mutual assured destruction (MAD), which kept the peace between both nations by ensuring that any war between them would result in, well, mutual assured destruction. This grim condition lasted until the Soviet Union finally, and peacefully, gave up.

In the 1980s Robert Jervis, the world’s most influential scholar on the nuclear revolution, developed a theory based on this experience. In his view, MAD was not a policy but an inescapable fact of international politics. Jervis predicted that MAD would impel the two Cold War superpowers to desist from arms racing and accept nuclear stalemate. Nuclear weapons would establish stability, keep the peace, and discourage fruitless security competition.

Green's The Revolution that Failed is the most important book yet published to refute this prediction. Deploying extensive historical research, Green shows that during the 1970s US policy makers did not act in accordance with Jervis’s theory. These officials operated from two core assumptions: one, that the balance of terror was more “delicate” than nuclear revolution theory admits and so could be overcome by minor technological shifts; two, that whatever the Americans thought, they could not be sure that Moscow accepted the nuclear revolution. As a result, the United States sought during this decade to pursue nuclear superiority, particularly by playing to its technological strengths. US policy during the 1970s thus clearly disconfirmed Jervis’s theory.

What about the possibility that US leaders engaged in nuclear competition not because they really believed it was necessary but because of domestic politics? After all, there were undeniable political advantages to such a policy, both in terms of feeding the military-industrial complex and in demonstrating Cold War toughness to the US electorate. Green deals with this objection by arguing that there were during the 1970s equally strong political incentives in Washington to decrease military spending and international tensions. He shows throughout the narrative body of his book that top officials in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations made their case for nuclear competition even in the face of political pressure.

On one level, Green’s argument is convincing. His research clearly demonstrates that, during the 1970s at least, US behavior failed to correspond with Jervis’s theoretical predictions. He also plausibly contends that political pressures coming from both directions make the domestic politics retort an incomplete means of explaining this behavior, although I believe that this is a difficult argument to really nail down. For obvious reasons, official policy documents rarely give us much insight into covert political motivations. Jimmy Carter is not going to say at a National Security Council meeting that he is endorsing a new policy on counterforce weaponry because he is worried that opposition to it might cost him in the next election.

What larger conclusions does Green draw? He sets out his stall in the introduction. “There is one obvious problem with MAD,” Green declares. “The Cold War superpowers don’t appear to have believed it” (p. 2). Here is the general counterrevolutionary historical claim, one that goes considerably beyond the specific 1970s argument he makes in the book: intense security competition during the Cold War proves that there was no nuclear revolution. This claim demands interrogation.

Green states that “the superpowers” did not believe in MAD. But who are we talking about? Green and other counterrevolutionaries are referring to military and civilian officials dealing with matters like arms control, strategy, weapons acquisition, new technologies, and the intentions and capabilities of the adversary. Their concern was formal military planning and policy—that was their job.

But they were not the only ones involved in the nuclear history of the Cold War. We must also assess the behavior of the “superpowers” when it came down to the actual prospect of a nuclear war. Both John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, for example, presided over all sorts of war planning during their terms in office. Yet during the Cuban Missile Crisis they forgot all about that and made it their business to find some way to prevent the showdown in the Caribbean from escalating into war. Their military policies may not have adhered to MAD, but they sure believed in it when they peered into the abyss.

And after the Cuban crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union never—not once—allowed themselves to get into a direct showdown again. For three decades they avoided confrontations like the ones in Berlin or Cuba: a decisive departure, and one that nobody expected, from the first 17 years of the Cold War.

There are other ways to identify the effect of the nuclear revolution during the Cold War than the theoretical model provided by Jervis. One can be stated simply: whatever weapons systems they authorized, whatever strategies they approved, the unique, apocalyptic dangers of a nuclear exchange dissuaded Cold War leaders—from Eisenhower to Reagan, from Khrushchev to Gorbachev—from ever believing that major war might be a good idea. Before the nuclear age, some leaders of major powers actively sought war and others hoped to avoid it—but they all were willing to fight, understood that war could bring benefits as well as costs, and knew that even in defeat their nations could continue to exist. During the nuclear age, this calculation disappeared. War would be nothing but an unmitigated catastrophe, akin more to a natural disaster than to an act of politics. As Eisenhower put it, we would be “digging ourselves out of ashes, starting again.”

I think it is self-evident that, in evaluating the salience of the nuclear revolution during the Cold War, we should pay more attention to what the leaders of the superpowers did at the moments of truth than what their bureaucracies planned for in quieter times. These leaders backed away from war during the crises of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and they steered clear of anything like that again for the next 30 years. Turn the history around. What if the military establishments of the two superpowers planned according to MAD, but their leaders were not so afraid of waging a nuclear war? Where would we be now?

We all know the answer to that question.