On Security, by Ronnie D. Lipschutz

4. Political Fission: State Structure, Civil Society, and Nuclear Weapons in the United States

Daniel Deudney

During the last half century the unlimited destructive capacity of nuclear weapons has put the question of the "fate of the earth" onto the political agenda for the first time in history. This has forced publics, leaders, and theorists to grapple with the nuclear political question: what kinds of policies, practices, and institutions are best suited to providing security in the nuclear era? Because the state and state-system are currently the dominant forms of political institutions concerned with security and violence, the nuclear political question is first about the fit between the nuclear forces of destruction and statist institutions and practices. Do these capabilities pose a revolutionary challenge to the state and its role as provider of security? Or can these new realities be accommodated with relatively insignificant institutional adjustment?

Realism, the ancient, diverse, and forceful tradition concerned with the relationships between power, security, and political order offers a rich set of theories and practices relevant to answering the nuclear political question. There are, however, fundamental disagreements among Realists on this question. Realist views on this relationship fall into three broad groups, which I call war strategism , deterrence statism , and nuclear one worldism . Each of these interpretations were articulated at the beginning of the nuclear era, and each is based upon the application of a powerful Realist theoretical insight. Definitive resolution of these disputes is difficult but intimately connected with security practice in the nuclear age. The recent end of the Cold War casts these disputes in a new light, and can in turn be better understood by the disputes within Realism.

The first school of Nuclear Realism argues the war strategist  view that the advent of nuclear weapons marks no decisive break in world politics and observes the behavior of states to be largely the same before and after their arrival. Interstate conflict is seen as endemic, and the quintessential state activity of preparing for and making war continues to define world politics. This view has been articulated by William Borden, Paul Nitze, Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, and Colin Gray. ¹ It postulates that states seeking security in a nuclear world will--and should--prepare themselves to exercise a full range of nuclear use options and seek to gain political advantage from relatively small differences in nuclear force levels. Although this view of the nuclear political question has been heavily attacked for a variety of important shortcomings, the actual force structures and military doctrines of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War embodied this view, to a first approximation and with significant anomalies.

A second Realist view, deterrence statism , holds that nuclear weapons have significantly altered, perhaps even revolutionized, interstate life by making war between nuclear-armed states prohibitively costly. In this view the states have created a strongly stable--perhaps the best of all possible--nuclear order by maintaining extensive nuclear forces in order to deter nuclear use. Such Realists take the state as a given, but hold that states can solve the nuclear security problem by changing their behavior and avoiding war. Deterrence statists commonly hold that nuclear weapons demand revolutionary changes in interstate relations, but not in states or in the state-system. Security is found in the deterrence relationship, and arms control is seen either as irrelevant or a modest enhancement of deterrence. This view was first articulated in the late 1940s by Bernard Brodie and variants of it are held by most contemporary neorealists, ² such as Robert Jervis and Kenneth Waltz. At the beginning of the nuclear era, this view was much less widely held than now. Early proponents emphasized the tentative, second-best, and temporary character of this solution, while most of its contemporary proponents see it as a highly enduring and sufficient solution. Although publics and militaries have resisted embracing this view, deterrence statism is the dominant theory among scholars of international relations and national security in the West.

The third school of nuclear Realism is nuclear one worldism , which holds that nuclear explosives pose a radical challenge to the core security-providing function of the state and that only major institutional changes in the state-centric world order can meet the challenge posed by nuclear capability. This revolutionary challenge cannot be met solely with changes in interstate relations ; rather survival imperatives require polities to achieve political reconciliation in order to practice and institutionalize new forms of non-state arms control. Most early nuclear one worlders held that the inevitable trajectory of nuclear politics was either a catastrophe or a world government of some sort. Nuclear one worldism reached its theoretical apogee around 1960 in the works of John Herz and Kenneth Boulding, ³ and was also forcefully stated by Hans Morgenthau. Nuclear one world theory has nearly disappeared with the rise in popularity of various deterrence statist theories. ⁴ Such ideas have continued to enjoy a strong but indistinct presence in the academic field of peace studies and in the citizen peace movement, where typically they are mixed and linked with ethical critiques of war, militarism and oppression that go far beyond the simple nuclear one world argument.

Is nuclear one worldism really Realist? This argument posits that the state-system is obsolete and likely to be replaced with either a world state or complemented with a non-state system-level security institution, but most Realists today hold that the state is the ontological given of Realism. Nuclear one worldism is the application to the nuclear era of the most primitive form of Realism, geopolitics (or what for purposes of clarity I call "security materialism") that analyzes the relationship between material forces of destruction and security providing practices and institutions. The essence of this paleo-Realist argument can be captured by analogy to Marxian historical production materialism: the forces of destruction, understood as the interaction of geography and technology, constitute the "base" which roughly determines the institutional "superstructure" constituted by security providing units and systems, one form of which has been the state. Security materialism posits that states and state systems emerge, persist, and are replaced according to whether they are, in the long term, viable or functional as providers of security. Neo-Realisms that take the state as a given and then examine its interaction with other states are inherently limited in their ability to theorize about the consequences of changes in the deep structure of material forces, such as the development of nuclear weapons.

Elsewhere ⁵ I have argued at length the superiority of a version of nuclear one worldism modified in two ways, with regard to how the state has been rendered obsolete, and what kind of security institution is more appropriate. First, the nuclear forces of destruction have rendered the state as a mode of protection simultaneously unnecessary and insufficient. Nuclear weapons are so destructive that the perennial state task of concentrating enough violence capability to balance against outside threats is generally solved, while at the same time the state approach of monopolizing violence within a particular territory is unsuited to the imperative task of separating and containing nuclear capability from political conflicts. Second, the institution needed to achieve security in the nuclear era is not a world state, as the early or classical nuclear worldists projected, but rather a "thick" regime of constraints on both leaders and arms, or what might be thought of as a nuclear republican union .

Modified Nuclear One Worldism and
the End of the Cold War

The end of the Cold War seems to have provided an important vindication to the modified version of nuclear one worldism. While this event has many contributing causes, ⁶ two features are central. First, the proximate cause of the end of the Cold War was the embrace by the leaders of both the United States and the Soviet Union of a view of nuclear weapons and their relation to state security that is, to a first approximation, nuclear one worldism. Second, the settlement of the Cold War was based on the establishment of an extensive system of arms control, and a commitment to go even further. In sharp contrast, these developments are completely unexpected and inexplicable to the war strategist ⁷ and deterrent statist ⁸ schools of nuclear Realism.

But viewing these developments as late vindications of modified nuclear one worldism raises as many questions as it answers. If the end of the Cold War is a problem for nuclear strategic and deterrence statist Realists, the Cold War itself poses problems for nuclear one worldism: Why did it last so long? Why are the global constraint institutions established in its wake so incomplete? And why did it end in the peculiar ways that did? The simplest answer to these questions is that it took time to experiment with the possibilities of nuclear capabilities, draw appropriate lessons, and then overcome other disputes in order to respond appropriately together.

This answer, while being to a first approximation sufficient, still leaves many aspects of the process and outcome underspecified. In this chapter, I sketch an extension of the modified nuclear one worldist argument to capture more of the political specificity of the end of the Cold War changes, whose general pattern among Realist theories only nuclear one worldism leads us to expect. In order to achieve this richer explanation of the political dynamics that culminated in the end of the Cold War, it is necessary to carefully examine intrastate  nuclear political dynamics.

Of particular interest is the role of the citizen peace movement and the radical anti-nuclear critique it advanced. The end of the Cold War came in the wake of the most vociferous and widespread popular anti-nuclear movement in history. The connection between this popular outburst and the end of the Cold war is hotly contested. On one side, former officials of the Reagan Administration and various conservatives completely discount its significance. ⁹ On the other hand, leaders of the peace movement, such as David Cortright of SANE, argue that it played a decisive role in moving the United States government to reciprocate the ambitious program of political reconciliation and nuclear arms control that Mikhail Gorbachev sought to achieve. ¹⁰ Almost all Realists are actively hostile to popular peace movements, or else indifferent to them, and almost all peace movement intellectuals and arms control specialists believe that their practices and program challenge Realism. Here, I challenge this contemporary consensus and argue that the practice and program of the anti-nuclear peace movement is consistent with the most basic Realists' reading of the nuclear political question, and that it is statist practice and institutions that are out of synch with Realist survival imperatives.

In order to make this case, I construct arguments about intrastate nuclear politics and employ them to explore patterns of popular resistance. Modified nuclear one worldism posits a system-level transformation caused by the deep structural material forces, but to understand the timing and political dynamics of the actual transformation, second image factors must be considered. How do deep structural material forces such as nuclear weapons flow through--or become blocked--on their way to determining system-level structure? I advance this corollary to modified nuclear one worldism: Nuclear weapons generate a profound legitimacy deficit  for states, for reasons rooted in the fundamental nature of states. Nuclear weapons deform civil society-state relations, and the consequent challenges to legitimacy provide the political energy or impetus to challenge core state practices and institutions. But state apparatuses are able to combat and for long periods avoid the political consequences of this deficit by embracing declaratory anti-nuclearism . This strategy of evasion is feasible because nuclear weapons are uniquely recludable , that is, their physical properties enable them to be kept out of public consciousness. It is these factors which account for the existence of contradiction  between deep material forces and institutional superstructures, and in their limits are to be found the triggers of structural adjustment or resolution. As a result of these evasions and their breakdowns, the actual patterns in which nuclear legitimacy deficits are politically manifested are likely to be highly eruptive , occurring in intense episodes triggered by the breakdown in evasive techniques.

The scenario sketched out in this second image corollary to modified nuclear one worldism is at the appropriate level of analysis, but is still too general and must be linked to an analysis of the specific national security constitutions of particular states. Thus, to complete the argument, I sketch the main features of the nuclear security constitution of the United States of America, and then examine how it also shapes the expression of the structural pressures generated by state obsolescence.

The argument in four steps . First, I summarize the nuclear one worldist argument on the obsolescence of statist practices and institutions. In the second section, I unfold the corollary of the impacts of modified nuclear one worldism on the dynamics of nuclear politics within nuclear possessed polities, specifying the structural deformations and legitimacy deficiencies that arise, as well as the structurally rooted opportunities and state strategies to evade them. In the third section, I analyze the ways in which the internal security structures of the United States shape the dynamics of nuclear legitimacy politics. There is a great deal of variability in the internal security constitutions of various states, and the United States is by no means typical. However, only by looking at these specific institutional structures is it possible to understand how the general pressures of nuclear illegitimacy are channelled, diverted, and ultimately manifested as political events. In the fourth and final section I focus upon the tumultuous nuclear politics of the United States during the Reagan administration that culminated in the end of the Cold War. Here I argue that the extraordinary patterns of nuclear politicization during this period are well-explained by the corollaries to the modified nuclear one worldist argument.

The Real-State Obsolescence Argument

The Real-State 

In analyzing the implications of nuclear explosives for the state, it is necessary to return to very elemental levels of analysis. To understand how the state as a protection unit has been affected by nuclear weapons, a clear image of the state is required. Before it is possible to gauge the effects of nuclear explosives upon security-providing institutions, the forms of those institutions must be clearly specified. In both political science and political discourse, the term "state" is used in so many ways as to be useless without further specification. Rather than search for the essential nature of the state, it is more analytically useful to distinguish and label the different phenomena that are commonly overpacked into the state. One such facet of the state that has been central to Realist international theory is the state as a "mode of protection," a distinctive, elemental and widely recurring statist approach to power and protection. The practice and theory of the state as a mode of protection has been most extensively developed by the European tradition of realpolitik . Out of deference to this ancient and rich tradition, and in order to avoid the semantic confusions inherent in offering yet another definition or redefinition of "the state" in general, I will refer to the state mode of protection as the real-state .

The real-state is a type of political institution characterized by five inter-related features:

1. the monopoly  of violence capability within a particular territorial space;

2. the concentration  of control over that violence capability in the hands of a distinct organization;

3. the relative autonomy  of the organizational apparatus wielding this capability;

4. the tendency to employ  the capability at its disposal and thus to couple  capability to outcomes; and

5. the public acceptance, or legitimacy , of state authority as a consequence of the state's ability to provide security.

According to this formulation, ¹¹ not every authoritative political order, state apparatus, territorially distinct polity, or recognized sovereign state is a real-state. Rather, real-states are governmental apparatuses that have these five distinctive attributes. For the real-state, to be  is to be able --to be capable of performing a specific task: the provision of security through the maintenance of a monopoly of violence capability in a particular territory. This image of the real-state as a mode of protection has been held, with minor variations and under a variety of labels, by a wide range of Realist theorists.

Although analytically distinct, the features of the real-state are integrally connected. Concentration and autonomy are closely linked to violence monopolies. For power to be monopolized in a meaningful fashion, it must be concentrated into the control of one organization. An organization possessing such a concentration of power will tend toward autonomy, both because its concentrated monopoly renders it intrinsically difficult to control, and because such autonomy greatly facilitates effective and efficient employment of its concentrated power. To achieve autonomy, the state apparatus strives to avoid checks and limits imposed either from within its polity or from outside it. The tendency for a state apparatus to seek autonomy from external control is not, of course, confined only to situations where violence capability lends itself to territorial compartmentalization, but is most likely to be realized in such situations. This quest for autonomy by the real-state apparatus is a feature of the real-state mode of protection that is most in tension with democratic and republican norms of governance.

The fifth feature of the real-state--legitimacy--is key to understanding state-civil society relations in the nuclear era. Legitimacy and authority are complex and elusive, but achieving and maintaining some rough acceptance by the members of the polity is necessary for all but the most coercive political orders. The legitimacy of real-states derives from their ability to secure their citizens. ¹² A real-state that lacks legitimacy will not be able to carry out the first four functions enumerated above; a state that carries out the first four functions in a manner that does not generate rough acceptance of its practices by members of the polity will lack legitimacy. ¹³

The Hobbesian claim that all political and social institutions can be derived from fear of physical death overstates the real-state stake on legitimacy, but few would deny that the general provision of such protection is a primary or basic task of states, a task upon whose successful completion--or at least strenuous pursuit--the rest of social and political life relies. For Realists, there is a primal link between the ability to provide security and the acceptance of a political regime by the people who live within it. ¹⁴ When the ability of a political order to deliver security declines, or is called widely into question, its legitimacy is likely to be compromised.

Nuclear Explosives and the End of the Real-State 

Against this sharp image of the state mode of protection, the impacts of nuclear explosives can be gauged. Nuclear weapons fundamentally challenge the real-state. They do so because they deny  the possibility that a political order of less than universal scope can monopolize violence capability within its territory. Prior to the advent of nuclear explosives, the scale requirements of military viability in the nuclear era mandated that an entity be of approximately continental scale, as the two world wars demonstrated. With the advent of nuclear explosives, an entity must encompass the entire globe, or else monopolize all nuclear capability (in which case one state would be secure, and all the rest insecure). Nuclear weapons are to the real-state what gunpowder was to the medieval fief: A technology that renders it militarily unviable. The scale imperatives of nuclear explosives mean that security can be achieved only through the creation of a worldwide state or the abandonment of the real-state approach to security and the creation of a security order that systematically paralyzes state power.

A simple analogy captures the impact of nuclear explosives upon the real-state. As Arnold Wolfers suggested, realpolitik theorists of states liken them to "billiard balls" knocking each other about, only weakly constrained by the "cobwebs" of interstate norms. ¹⁵ The invention of nuclear explosives turns billiard balls into "eggs," and the continuing quest for security drives fragile states to create cushioning and protective structures not unlike an "egg carton." The "hard-shelled" billiard balls of pre-nuclear times knocked each other about for political and security gain, but collision has become suicidal for the inescapably vulnerable eggs of the nuclear world. Where the billiard ball states crashed through the weak webs of international norms and institutions, the fragile nuclear egg states sit paralyzed, and have begun, but not finished, creating an egg carton--a system of mutually protective norms and institutions. These egg-like states can co-exist, if they are cautious, but to be cautious means to yield up at least some of the perquisites of the billiard ball states of the past.

Support for the proposition that the real-state has been fundamentally compromised by nuclear explosives can be found by comparing the security-related definitions of the real-state provided by Hobbes, Ranke, and Weber with nuclear security realities. The advent of nuclear weapons makes the interstate system akin to Hobbes's "state of nature" because it is possible for political collectivities to suffer a sudden and comprehensive death. Nuclear weapons greatly weaken the gradation between the larger powers and the smaller ones. In a world with abundant nuclear weapons, it is possible for even the largest human collectivities to be quickly and completely destroyed. Nuclear weapons have also created a condition of essential equality with regard to survival. Once a state apparatus or human organization, no matter how otherwise lacking in assets, acquires a certain number and type of nuclear weapons, that state is the peer of even the largest state in the most fundamental sense that the small state can effectively "kill" the large one.

The nuclear revolution means essentially that the greatest of state sovereigns have fallen back into a state of nature vis-à-vis each other. At the end of the Second World War, the greatest sovereign states were in an Hobbesian "state of war" with each other but, as they were not capable of killing each other, were not in a "state of nature" with each other. Now they have had their military viability pulled out from under them and are, in the most essential respects, more like men in the "state of nature" than sovereigns in the "state of war." Thus, the logic of Hobbes's argument applied to the nuclear era points toward the creation of a world sovereign, as several Hobbes scholars have pointed out. ¹⁶

Ranke's definition of a "Great Power" provides a second powerful indicator that nuclear weapons have fundamentally challenged the state mode of protection. In his classic analysis of European power politics, the German historian Leopold von Ranke defined a great power as " . . . a power capable of standing alone in war against a coalition of other Great Powers and surviving." ¹⁷ Since not even the United States and the Soviet Union could have stood alone against each other in a war and survived, they were not, by Ranke's definition "great powers." If sheer magnitude of power were the measure, or if power relative to all other states were the measure, then the United States and the Soviet Union would surely have qualified for special status. ¹⁸ Ranke's definition, however, centers upon neither absolute quantity of power nor simple relative power, but is about the capability of states to achieve an absolute value or condition--survival in war--against other similarly-capable powers. In the nuclear era, the last of the "great powers" have been abolished by the "superpowers" in the sense of their supercapabilities, but this abolition has been obscured by the tendency to speak of political collectivities as well as things and capabilities as "superpowers."

Weber's classic definition of the state also points to the fundamental challenge posed by nuclear explosives. Many of the institutions which today claim to be states have the only legitimate capacities for violence within their territory, but they do not have the ability to prevent other state apparatuses from effectively sending overwhelming military force onto their territory. And, because nuclear weapons can be hurled or dropped, more or less at will, anywhere on the planet, there is no institution which has the monopoly of violence in any particular territory. The invasion of territory and nuclear bombardment may not constitute legitimate uses of violence, but they can occur nevertheless. Institutions claiming to be states have the only legitimate capacities for violence in all territories, but none has the monopoly of violence in any territory. "States" today have a monopoly on the ability to legitimize  violence, but they do not have the ability to monopolize  violence.

Nuclear Contradiction 

Nuclear weapons have rendered the real-state approach to security nonviable, but security-providing institutions appropriate to the new security imperatives and opportunities have emerged only partially. The paralysis of states entailed in deterrence, and the limited arms control achieved in the nuclear era, mark important steps away from the real-state approach, and the first steps down a path the logic of which has yet to be fully understood (and whose exploration is beyond the scope of this paper). But absent a full adjustment, existing real-state institutions are in contradiction to the existing forces of destruction. When institutions are in such a condition of contradiction, they still exist but they have been drained of their previous functionality, and they sit increasingly as facades. In such a situation, they are unrelated, except negatively, to the actual achievement of the security goals that animated their creation. There are two criteria for judging whether a contradiction exists. First, do the dominant security approaches generate counterproductive consequences when they are brought to bear on security issues? Second, does security derive from the ad hoc departures from the dominant approaches rather than from their application?

To say that the present situation is characterized by a contradiction is to imply that a consolidation of some sort between the existing security institutions is necessary in order to achieve their primal objective as providers of protection services. Protection-providing units which are in contradiction to the forces of destruction are like firms that are natural monopolies but which are forced to consolidate by changes in the economies of scale in the provision of services in order to avoid ruinous competition. Whether consolidated institutions will emerge without or through ruinous competition is not, however, determined in this model.

States, Violence, and Legitimacy

From the general argument about nuclear weapons and the real-state, we are now prepared to unfold our second-image corollaries to modified nuclear one worldism: How does the obsolescence of the state mode of protection affect the relationship between the state apparatus and the citizens or populace of states entailed in deterrence, and the limited arms controa political unit? What happens to the relationship between a state apparatus that cannot fulfill its historical role as protector, and a civil society that cannot be protected?

Violence Capabilities and Domestic Politics 

In analyzing the domestic politics of nuclear weapons, it is necessary to examine the overall political system rather than simply the internal structure of the state apparatus. Much of the work of security analysts has focused on either the force structures within military organizations, or upon the civil-military relations within the state apparatus, leaving the relationship between nuclear weapons and the overall security constitution largely unexplored. A polity's security constitution ¹⁹ encompasses the relationships between the citizens of the polity, the instruments of violence, and state structure. The citizens of a polity and their relation to and degree of control over violence capabilities and organizations are as much a part of that polity's security constitution as are its military organizations.

At the core of any polity's security constitution is its system of "arms control"--the ways in which polities internally organize the control of violence capability, and particularly the interface between the instrumentalities of violence and domestic political order. Although nuclear weapons are new, analysis of the relationship between violence capabilities and domestic politics has a long pedigree. As Otto Hintze pointed out nearly a century ago, the internal form of a polity will be heavily shaped by demands of the security environment: "The form and spirit of the state's organization will not be determined solely by economic and social relations and clashes of interests, but primarily by the necessities of defense and offense, that is, by the organization of the army and of warfare." ²⁰

The security environment of a polity has two interactive but distinctive components: the particular interstate setting or system in which a polity exists, (i.e. proximity to other actors, relative power of other actors, the intentions of other actors, etc.) and the military technological environment--the types of military capacity that are prevalent in a particular era. ²¹

In looking for antecedents to the nuclear revolution, history provides many examples of important changes in military technology having revolutionary impacts upon the internal life of polities. Innovations such as bronze weapons, iron weapons, the stirrup, walls and siege works, the long-bow, and gunpowder all had major effects upon internal political structures. Changes in military technology alter political order within polities by changing the relative power of various groups within the polity, and the relative size and political power of the state within the polity. ²²

The Deformation of State-Civil Society Relations 

The inability of a state apparatus of less than comprehensive scope to secure itself in the nuclear era has "revolutionary" implications for the basic relationship between the state apparatus and the citizens of the polity. If citizens were purely consumers of protection services, and if states were purely providers of such services, then a consolidation of protection-providing institutions could be expected in the nuclear era. In the absence of such consolidation, state apparatuses are thrown into a curiously antagonistic relationship to their citizens. Deformations of the citizen-state relationship can be expected to exist in all legitimate polities possessing nuclear weapons, but they should be particularly pronounced and visible in those polities where the state apparatus' role as servant of the citizenry has been most extensively and effectively institutionalized.

Life in a world of nuclear-armed states sunders the common interest between state apparatus and citizenry. The state apparatus' interest in autonomy is thrown into conflict with civil society's interest in survival. The basic fact of life in the nuclear world is simple: The state apparatus can no longer relate to civil society as the effective protector of civil society from destruction. Nuclear destruction does not, however, confront countries in an unmediated form but is experienced in terms of the deterrent relationship. As long as deterrence does not fail, the gap that exists between security promise  and performance  is potential rather than actual. By maintaining nuclear weapons only for purposes of deterrence (i.e. only to retaliate against an attacker using nuclear weapons), the state apparatus can achieve a partial substitute for military viability. As long as deterrence does not fail, the relationship between nuclear weapons and societal destruction remains a potential  rather than an actual  one.

Deterrence seems to be an innocuous nuclear age approximation and extension of the traditional role of the state apparatus as defender of civil society, or at worst making the best of a bad situation, but it has a deeper meaning for the relationship between the state apparatus and civil society. A strategy of deterrence turns the relationship between civil society and the state apparatus on its head. For a state apparatus to hold nuclear weapons for the purpose of "deterrence" means that the state apparatus makes a conscious decision to accept its own civil society as a hostage. As the legal theorist John Barton notes:

[Nuclear deterrence] affects the philosophical relationship between government and citizen, for in the nuclear era a government can defend its own citizens only through threats to attack other nation's citizens or through agreements with other governments, sometimes even designed to leave its own citizens vulnerable. The government's defense function is, in a sense, turned against its citizens, and part of the unity of interest between government and citizen is lost. ²³

Policies designed to hold civil society hostage to nuclear threat are not the only possible response to the security threat posed by the nuclear world. The state apparatus has (at least in principle) the alternative of abrogating or abridging its autonomy to a larger security entity. This situation poses a dilemma for civil society-state relations: Will the state apparatus continue to force civil society to undergo the conditional suicide of nuclear deterrence or will civil society force the state apparatus to commit the conditional suicide of modification of its autonomy to an exterior entity (e.g. a world state, a world federation, or a world disarmament authority)? The most basic political meaning of the nuclear revolution for civil society-state apparatus relations is that the autonomy of the state apparatus and the security of civil society are in direct and inescapable contradiction with each other.

This clash between the state apparatus' interest in autonomy and civil society's interest in survival can be described in terms of the choices faced by an individual, in Hobbes's "state of nature," who is contemplating entrance into civil society through the ratification of the basic social contract. An appropriate analogy in Hobbes's model for the choice between state apparatus autonomy and civil society survival would be an "interior dialogue" between the man-in-the-state-of-nature's will  and body . Facing a precarious life in the full state of nature, the corporeal body will favor trading away the autonomy of will--the freedom to do whatever one wills in the state of nature--in order to achieve security for the body from violence. The will, on the other hand, will seek to remain in the state of nature where its autonomy will be completely unabridged. For Hobbes, the decisive argument is with the body for, without continued corporeal existence, the will is also extinguished and thus cannot be exercised. Hobbes's materialistic model of man is slanted in favor of the entry into civil society: Bodily survival is a necessary pre-requisite for the autonomy of the will .

Nuclear Legitimacy Deficits 

This deformation of the relationship between the state and civil society has important implications for the legitimacy of state institutions. Assuming that the provision of security generates legitimacy for state institutions, the deformation of the traditional state apparatus-civil society relationship will significantly compromise the legitimacy of the state apparatus in the eyes of civil society.

The concept of a structurally rooted deficiency or gap in the legitimacy of states and other institutions has been extensively explored by political scientists. The popularity and acceptability of particular state apparatus policies and actions wax and wane according to many factors. But when popular dissatisfaction becomes either chronic or particularly intense, structural sources are often to blame. Legitimacy deficits occur when a significant gap exists between what the populace comes to expect and what the state apparatus is able to provide. ²⁴ A legitimacy deficit  may be defined generally as a loss of state apparatus authority caused by its failure to perform some important and expected function. A legitimacy crisis  occurs when such a deficiency manifests itself in a particularly intense fashion. Legitimacy deficits are often chronic and cloaked, and only erupt episodically into crises. In short, legitimacy deficits stem from gaps between performance and promise, and legitimacy crises are eruptive manifestations of this situation.

Most of the theoretical analysis on legitimacy and structure has focused upon the relationships between the state apparatus, class structure, and the modes and forces of production. Neo-Marxist scholars have extensively employed the concept of a "legitimacy crisis" to understand the consequences of domestic contradictions, particularly between capitalist economies and democratically constituted states and, less frequently, to understand contradictions stemming from a state's position within an international political economy beyond its control. ²⁵

Legitimacy deficits and crises can also be expected in situations where a significant gap exists between the state apparatus' obligated promise and its potential performance in meeting the security needs, or perceptions of need, of the members of civil society. The contradiction between state purpose and performance in a nuclear world can be expected to exist in every country, because all countries have the elemental expectation that the state apparatus will seek or achieve at least some minimum physical security.

This deficiency is generally less sensitive to regime type than to other structurally rooted legitimacy problems, but still shows some variation. The contradiction between security performance and purpose is likely to be less acute and in less visible form in highly statist  countries, where the state has subordinated, marginalized, or absorbed civil society, and where it is widely accepted that the part of the polity outside the state apparatus exists solely for the benefit of the state apparatus. ²⁶ Conversely, the manifestations of such deficiencies are likely to be much more severe in countries with constitutions subordinating the state to civil society. Thus, among the nuclear-armed polities, the legitimacy deficits caused by the contradiction between security promise and performance can be expected to be most extreme in liberal democratic republics such as the United States, as Henry Kissinger has observed:

[The strategy of mutual assured destruction] imposes an unbearable psychological burden. For how long can democratic leaders tell their public that their security is based on leaving them naked to extermination? Faced with such prospects, pacifism and unilateral disarmament will sooner or later sap the will to defend the West. ²⁷

State Legitimation Strategies 

States are structures, but governments are actors, and as such they are not simply passive recipients of pressures. Executives of states actively seek to shape their environment and to evade or escape uncongenial realities. In order to avoid the full revolutionary implications of nuclear explosives for their autonomy, state apparatuses in the nuclear era have sought to manage nuclear legitimacy problems through nuclear reclusion  and declaratory anti-nuclearism . These are coping and managing responses that do not solve or eliminate the actual problems but, at best, only ameliorate them. Such strategies also entail their own costs, and are subject to breakdowns. Their existence is further evidence of the contradiction between state institutions and nuclear security imperatives, and a reason why nuclear legitimacy problems manifest themselves in the patterns they do.

One managing or compensatory response to nuclear contradiction is for states to attempt to hide or obscure the presence or implications of nuclear weapons from their citizens. Nuclear reclusion combats nuclear legitimacy deficits because nuclear weapons that are out-of-sight are also out-of-mind for the public. Prior to the nuclear era, weapons were frequently objects of public display, in parades and other public ceremonies that served to enhance the prestige and reputation of a state both at home and abroad. A display of pre-nuclear military capability was likely to engender feelings of pride and patriotism in the citizenry and enhance public confidence in the legitimacy and effectiveness of a state. By contrast, nuclear weapons tend to evoke dread and unease among the public whom they are intended to protect, thus undercutting state legitimacy and public patriotism. As a result, state apparatuses have been quite careful to keep nuclear weapons as much out of sight as possible. ²⁸

Nuclear reclusion is appealing  because it combats nuclear legitimacy deficits, but it is feasible  only because of nuclear weapons' highly distinctive features and their compact form. The relative ease with which states have been able to recluse nuclear weapons rests upon the distinctive material features of the devices. Nuclear weapons lack a salience in everyday life, and so are relatively easy to keep from public view. This feature of nuclear weapons helps account for the infrequency with which the nuclear legitimacy deficit has erupted into an actual legitimacy crisis.

Evidence for the importance of nuclear reclusion in sustaining nuclear legitimacy can be found by examining the handful of instances in which the state could not maintain the separation between its nuclear activities and the civil population. Two of the most politically important public resistances to nuclear weapons in the United States were the opposition to atmospheric nuclear testing during the late 1950s and the early 1960s, and to the proposed basing of anti-ballistic missile (ABM) interceptors near cities during the late 1960s. ²⁹ In both cases, the public was aroused by the intrusion of nuclear capability into their everyday lives. The opposition to atmospheric nuclear testing was based upon the public's awareness that it was being poisoned by the radioactive fallout, and the elimination of atmospheric nuclear testing--not testing in general--caused public concern to diminish. ³⁰

The second episode of successful public activism against nuclear weapons took place in response to the efforts of the Johnson and Nixon Administrations to deploy a limited ABM, which generated intense public opposition to the placing of nuclear anti-missile missiles around American cities. ³¹ By contrast, the MIRVing of Minuteman missiles in the early 1970s was a much more strategically significant development. It proceeded with little public concern, however, because it never intruded into everyday life. What the episodes have in common is that they were caused by the inability of the state to keep the nuclear world clearly separated from the civilian world. ³²

State apparatuses also can manage or compensate for the legitimacy problems posed by nuclear weapons by embracing anti-nuclearism at a rhetorical level. States have frequently introduced and maintained a wide gap between nuclear declaratory policy and nuclear operational policy. Gaps between word and deed are as old as history, but the nuclear era is exceptional for the intensity of anti-nuclear propaganda propagated by nuclear-armed states. States have sought to deflect popular unease about nuclear insecurity by posing as advocates of nuclear abolition or deep disarmament. Since the very beginning of the nuclear era, the American political leadership has frequently declared its support for the elimination of nuclear weapons. President Truman's support for the Baruch Plan, which envisioned eventual disarmament, was part of a strategy of building public support for continued American nuclear weapon possession and development. ³³ During the 1950s and early 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union traded a series of proposals for deep disarmament that were motivated, in part, by a similar desire. ³⁴ Nuclear utopianism has been a vital instrument of state apparatus legitimacy during the nuclear era. ³⁵

American Security Structures
and Nuclear Illegitimacy

We have hypothesized the existence of a nuclear legitimacy deficit and described some of the ways in which it can be managed and deflected, but we are still only partially prepared to begin looking for evidence for it and employing this model to explain events of the 1980s. The structurally-rooted legitimacy deficit postulated by a modified nuclear one worldism argument does not exist in a political vacuum but will inevitably be refracted by the specific institutional structures of a polity's security constitution. To draw an analogy from astrophysics, the pressures created by the obsolescence of the real-state are like the "solar wind" of charged particles steadily striking the earth from the sun. These forces do not, however, strike the ground evenly, but are instead shaped by the earth's magnetic field. As they pass through this field, the solar forces are not stopped or diminished, but rather concentrated in some locations, diverted from others, and given a distinct overall shape. In a similar manner, the pressures produced by nuclear legitimacy deficits are directed and diverted by the institutional structures of a polity's security constitution. They do not make themselves felt everywhere in the same way or degree; instead they are particularly intense at some institutional locations while being weak in others.

To understand the institutional fields shaping these forces, we must thus examine a second and more variable set of security structures: The specific organizations and institutions tasked with the regulation of violence and the provision of security. Our main interest is not with this structure but, instead, in the more basic dynamic of nuclear legitimacy. But because such intrapolity structures exist, they must be mapped and analyzed for the ways in which they refract the pressures. Such an analysis will help us identify places where the nuclear legitimacy deficits are likely to emerge as political phenomena.

The American Nuclear Security Constitution 

Single case studies can never be definitive, but there are three strong reasons why a close examination of the nuclear legitimacy dynamics in the United States is particularly interesting. First, the United States has possessed nuclear weapons longer than any other state, information about American nuclear political control is relatively more available, and nuclear weapons policy has been subject to extensive debate. Second, democratic institutions and norms are particularly well established in the United States, and the depth of reflection and concern with internal control of violence capability and war-making authority in the American political tradition and Constitutional structure exceeds that of any other major state in the world. Third, the United States has been the most powerful state in the post-World War II era; the resulting pressure to compete with other states, while quite strong, would still be expectably less than would be the case in smaller and more precariously situated countries.

The fundamentals of the nuclear era security constitution of the United States can be readily schematized. Three features of this security constitution are of particular importance. First, the executive occupies a central position in the American nuclear security constitution. The office of the President as originally constituted was balanced and checked by the Congress, the states and citizen militias, but these constraints do not significantly bind the Presidency in the nuclear security constitution. The Presidency is the juncture where the apparatus for commanding nuclear weapons must be mediated with the citizens of the polity.

A second feature of the nuclear security constitution is that the citizenry has been reduced to a largely passive and non-participating role and is fundamentally disengaged from the control of nuclear weapons. Whereas the hallmark of the original American security constitution was the direct possession of the instruments of violence by the citizenry, the nuclear security constitution completely removes nuclear weapons from the hands of the citizens and the militia. ³⁶

Third, the link between executive and nuclear weapons has been greatly strengthened. A key feature of the contemporary nuclear security constitution is the elaborate system of electronic locks and codes placed upon nuclear weapons. ³⁷ These technologies and systems have introduced a fundamentally new option into the arms control repertoire: the possibility of separating weapon possession  from weapon control . These technologies thus enable the United States to maintain its tradition of preventing the military from having exclusive control over the instruments of violence.

Three Types of Anti-nuclearism 

In the paleo-Realism of nuclear one worldism, the legitimacy challenge posed by nuclear weapons is essentially based on their problematic relationship to the most primal of Realist values: survival. But nuclear weapons in the American polity have posed two other legitimacy problems as well, ones that should be distinguished from the core of our argument. The survivalist  challenges that derive from the public vulnerability produced by nuclear violence are different in important ways from the traditional moralist  and pacifist  criticisms of state violence, as well as the particular Constitutional corruption  concerns unique to American politics. The nuclear problem has sharpened and intensified the moralist and constitutional corruption objection. These three legitimacy challenges are fundamentally different, but they do overlap, obscuring the distinctively Realist nature of the nuclear legitimacy problem, so it is necessary to briefly describe and distinguish them.

Strong moral and ethical arguments against the use of nuclear weapons constitute a distinct, but powerful, challenge to the legitimacy of nuclear weapons. The essence of the moral critique is the claim that nuclear weapons are inherently genocidal (if not omnicidal) and that mass murder is not, or should not be, a legitimate option of statecraft. Many modern wars have generated moral challenges to their legitimacy from pacifists who claimed that killing was wrong and war was organized murder. But this objection was not nearly so pronounced a basis for civil society-state apparatus conflict and legitimation challenge as nuclear weapons have been. In terms of the Hobbesian "state of nature," the moral challenge to nuclearism is like an individual wishing to leave the state of nature because that individual finds it morally objectionable to kill (as opposed to his fear of being killed).

The legitimacy deficit posed by nuclear weapons should also be distinguished from the legitimacy problems that have attended the United States' activities as a Great Power. Since the founding of the American republic, and with growing intensity during the last half century, Constitutionally defined relationships have been significantly deformed. This has generated a chronic legitimation problem, with "the flag outrunning the Constitution." This legitimation problem is the consequence of the United States' role as a state with an extended military and diplomatic presence throughout the world and from the exercise of hegemonic power within its spheres of influence. Such foreign involvement corrupts and deforms the domestic political system by: 1) altering the balance of power within the government by shifting power from Congress to the President, creating an "Imperial Presidency" and a "state within a state"; 2) limiting popular control over the government and increasing state apparatus autonomy; 3) corrupting and militarizing the political culture; 4) eroding civil liberties; and 5) sapping economic strength and corrupting capitalist "free enterprise." The deleterious consequences of these foreign interventions, entangling alliances, and the institutions necessary to sustain them were given classic statement by George Washington and John Adams. Such objections were raised by opponents of the War with Mexico, taken up again by the opponents of the Spanish-American and Philippine War, reiterated in the 1930s by Charles Beard, and yet again in the 1960s and 1970s in response to the demands of global anti-communist containment, and Vietnam, in particular. This regime corruption and deformation has been accentuated by the nuclear revolution.

Nuclear weapons pose a legitimacy problem for American state institutions that is, in some respects, a similar, if more extreme, version of those posed by the burdens of traditional Great Power activity. But at their most fundamental level, they are opposites. Their difference can be described thus: The older one is caused by the fact that the United States (vis-à-vis weaker neighbors) is  a Great Power; the newer one is caused by the fact that the United States (vis-à-vis survival against nuclear attack) is not  a Great Power. The older, pre-nuclear challenge stems from an excess  of strength toward neighbors; the newer nuclear challenge stems from an absence  of strength to achieve basic security.

Publics, Presidents, and Militaries 

Combining this structure with the general pressures of nuclear illegitimacy suggests that the politics of nuclear weapons are likely to take several distinct forms, as can be seen from the recent nuclear history of the United States.

First, the Presidency is an institutional juncture where two very different demands and discourses must somehow be reconciled. The people want security, and the military wants to win wars. In the pre-nuclear era, these two could be reconciled; in the nuclear era, security means not fighting wars, and winning wars means no security. Given these dual demands, the Presidency will tend to be Janus-faced and equivocal, saying and doing different--if not opposite--things to its different constituencies. On the one side, the Presidency will want to keep nuclear issues and the public as far removed from one another as possible. Where complete evasion is not possible, the Presidency will want to reassure the public that everything possible is being done to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons.

Second, the public will tend to be generally quiescent so long as this contradiction does not receive full airing, either through speeches or actions; when the contradiction is aired, however, the public will become eruptive . An alternating pattern of long noninvolvement and episodic intense involvement is produced by the structure of the nuclear security constitution. It also follows from this observation that, when the public does become intensely involved, its attitudes toward nuclear issues will be undersocialized into the norms and assumptions of the state security apparatus regarding nuclear weapons. ³⁸

The third consequence of the public's relationship to nuclear weapons is that it will not provide good support for the emergence of a critical mass of sustained intellectual critique. The Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, in analyzing the formation of consciousness conducive to revolutionary change, spoke about the formation of "organic intellectuals" whose ideas and theories would provide the strategies and designs for systemic alternatives. ³⁹ The relationship between nuclear weapons and civil society is, in particular, not especially conducive to the generation of organic intellectuals devoted to creating and disseminating nuclear structural alternatives. When the public is quiescent, the state and its derivative organs-- including extra-governmental "think tanks" and academics concerned with nuclear security--will tend to monopolize discourse on nuclear issues. In this situation, experts inclined to be fundamentally critical of the status quo will lack institutional support and so will be relatively few in number compared to the legions of state-supported and state-supporting experts. In order to remain relevant, experts critical of the status quo will be forced to work only on incremental alternative measures that have credibility with statist representatives. Absent an agent to implement their schemes, organic intellectuals offering models of nuclear security orders congruent with public safety, rather than state interests, will be regarded as "utopian," as were socialists prior to the emergence of the working class.

These features of the public's relationship to deep structural nuclear realities mean that moments of public eruption are less likely to give birth to enduring institutional change. When public nuclear concern suddenly does emerge in full force, the intellectual groundwork for alternatives will not have been prepared, and those experts concerned with nuclear alternatives will see their incremental agendas swamped by possibilities they are unprepared to exploit. Furthermore, the absence of organic nuclear survival intellectuals means that the leadership of the eruptive moments will tend to pass into the hands of other elites outside the state apparatus with the resources at hand to lead. But these elites will have their own orientations and agendas that will tend to become conflated with nuclear issues, and will tend to employ public concern to further their established goals.

Nuclear Doctrines as Political Ideologies 

The structural analysis of nuclear politics also suggests that, in the nuclear era, there will be a stratification of nuclear ideologies in democratic polities. The various schools of thinking about nuclear policy are typically treated as competing substantive  claims about nuclear reality. But they are also ideological formulations that serve to legitimate the activities of various actors and to advance their interests. The old adage "where one stands is determined by where one sits" can be fruitfully applied to understand the nuclear realm.

If nuclear ideology reflects differing situational interests, then we should expect a stratification of nuclear thinking into three broad levels. First, military organizations have a distinct corporate interest in and orientation to military questions that are not simply derivative of broader formulations of the "national" interest. Building on organization theory, Barry Posen has pointed out that, all else being equal, military organizations have a corporate interest in larger budgets, greater autonomy, and in having a political mandate to win wars, rather than defend against or avenge attacks. Military organizations thus will tend to prefer doctrines and force structures that are oriented toward the offense (pre-emption, escalation-dominance, and victory), rather than defense or deterrence. ⁴⁰ In the nuclear era, this military organizational interest will tend to generate and support the war strategist  orientation toward nuclear weapons. War strategism thus provides support for the "conventionalization" of nuclear weapons, and for military force structures and doctrines that require large numbers of nuclear weapons postured for use in a wide range of situations.

Second, the public, while generally uninformed about the intricacies of nuclear issues, will tend to favor measures that eliminate the threat of nuclear destruction, either through disarmament or defense. Civil society will, depending upon circumstances, thus tend toward nuclear one worldist  orientations that will be threatening to state autonomy and to the approaches preferred by military organizations. These orientations will be dismissed by the state apparatus and its supporters as "utopian," "idealist," or "unrealistic." The state apparatus and its ideologies will tend to treat as unrealistic positions that are unstatist, even if their statist orientations are dysfunctional according to the Realist criteria of survival.

Third, the executive (and the parastatal sectors that serve it) will be forced to somehow mediate between the politically explosive opposites of public nuclear one worldism and military war strategism. The civilian executive must simultaneously gain popular acceptance for policies and perform the role of commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Given this structurally rooted ideological stratification, the office of the Presidency should be particularly subject to turbulence and disjuncture, because it is here that popular anti-nuclearism must be mediated with its antithesis of nuclear employment. This is where one individual must cope with intense competing pressures and, somehow, square the circle.

In order to cope with these opposing demands, the senior civilian leadership and parastatals that serve them will tend to embrace doctrines of deterrence. Such doctrines respond to both the military's demands for an expansive offensive capability, and the people's desire to be secured from the nuclear world. The prevalence of such deterrence orientations among civilian strategists has recently been attested to by Richard Betts, a national security intellectual:

Outside the fraternity of strategists and foreign policy experts the idea [of nuclear deterrence] has been less hallowed; from anti-military intellectuals, to President Reagan, to the Catholic Bishops, some have questioned the morality or durability of policies based on deterrence. With the exception of a minority of radicals, these challenges were episodic or inchoate and never dented the dominance of the principle [of nuclear deterrence] within circles that make or analyze foreign policy. ⁴¹

It is notable that what Kissinger thought of as a deep-seated tendency within democratic publics, Betts regarded as a marginal phenomenon, held only by marginalized radicals. Those critics who point out that doctrines of nuclear deterrence do not add up conceptually miss the more essential point that they are, at least in part, ideologies meant to appeal simultaneously to opposing constituencies. The appeal of such deterrence doctrines is that they promise, or at least attempt, to square the circle--to simultaneously constrain the military's appetite while soothing the fears of the citizenry.

The Reagan Nuclear Episode

Many of the most powerful political currents of the nuclear era reached a climax in the early 1980s during the Reagan Administration, whose behavior on nuclear questions was extraordinarily erratic. ⁴² In 1981, the Reagan era began with a campaign designed to convince the Soviet Union that the United States could "prevail" in a nuclear war, but it ended with a near-commitment by President Reagan to abolish nuclear weapons. A closer look at this peculiar period reveals the dynamic of nuclear legitimation and de-legitimation more clearly and strongly than ever before.

Reagan, Rhetoric, and Reaction 

The opening act of the drama was the unprecedented attempt by President Ronald Reagan, and many key officials in his administration, to close the gap between declarative and operational nuclear policy by saying publicly that the United States would do what it had long been preparing to do. Numerous Reagan Administration officials publicly espoused a war strategist understanding of nuclear weapons. ⁴³ Rhetorically, nuclear weapons were treated as conventional ones, and the dangers of nuclear use were downplayed, if not wholly dismissed. Ironically, perhaps, the Reagan Administration's departures were much greater in rhetorical than operational terms. In terms of operational doctrine and the deployment of nuclear forces, the Reagan Administration's initiatives marked only incremental changes from the policies of the Carter Administration, and those before it. But at a rhetorical level, the change was revolutionary. For the first time since World War II, U.S. officials cast aside the rhetorical facade of anti-nuclearism and brought American declarative policy into line with actual operational and deployment policy.

This unprecedented rhetorical revision stimulated a public eruption, a rapid and massive rise in public anxiety, opposition, and activism. On June 12, 1982, between 500,000 and one million Americans rallied in New York City's Central Park in support of a "freeze" on nuclear weapons. ⁴⁴ Public opinion polls consistently showed that somewhere between two-thirds and three-fourths of the adult population of the United States supported efforts, of a fairly radical and comprehensive nature, to restrain and reverse the nuclear arms race. ⁴⁵ Much of the public activism was focused upon the proposal for a "nuclear freeze" advocated by a largely "grass-roots" political movement. ⁴⁶ Brent Scowcroft, a retired Air Force general and National Security Adviser during the Ford and Bush Administrations, observed: "What seems to be emerging in the United States is a reaction at both ends of the political spectrum against deterrence and the despair which in the current situation it tends to promote." ⁴⁷ A range of religious leaders, most notably the Catholic Bishops' Conference, ⁴⁸ seriously called into question the basic tenet of nuclear strategy, the willingness to retaliate against, and thus deter, a nuclear attack.

As a result of these developments, thoughtful observers from diverse political viewpoints registered a "sea change" in basic popular and elite attitudes toward nuclearism. Deterrence was attacked from both ends of the political spectrum. On the right, conservatives who otherwise supported the Reagan Administration insisted that the willingness of the government to tolerate, even support, the permanent vulnerability of its citizens to assured destruction was an abrogation of its basic responsibilities. On the left, Richard Falk, with perhaps some overstatement, spoke of a "societal consensus" against reliance upon nuclear weapons and argued that "the state is losing its legitimacy in the national security sector, especially in relation to nuclear war." ⁴⁹ Because deterrence was de-legitimated on the both the political right and left, the more basic fissure in this debate was between the democratic and libertarian elements of civil society, on the one side, and the state security apparatus on the other. So widespread was this calling into question of deterrence that even Robert W. Tucker, a well-known realpolitik  scholar and foreign policy commentator, spoke gravely about a dangerous loss of "nuclear faith" and predicted that this challenge to the nuclear state was not a temporary or passing event:

. . . there seems little doubt but that a striking change in attitude has occurred and that in consequence the public now takes a far less acquiescent view toward nuclear weapons than it once did. Nuclear weapons are no longer seen to strengthen the nation's security. Instead they are increasingly found to have weakened it. . . . Although triggered in large measure by careless words of Reagan Administration officials, the movement and controversy are the results of developments that can scarcely be laid at the doorstep of this Administration. To argue that the emergence of the nuclear issue in the 1980s can be seen as the work of a misguided administration during its first years in office is to misunderstand the deeper significance of recent events and the portent they may well hold out. Although the activity of the anti-nuclear movement has clearly abated, the basic circumstances conditioning the explosive emergence of the nuclear issue have not diminished. If anything, they may be expected to grow stronger with the passage of time. ⁵⁰

The unpopularity of the policies of one Administration does not itself demonstrate the existence of a structurally rooted crisis in civil society-state apparatus relations. But the breadth and depth of this attitudinal shift provides evidence that the chronic and cloaked legitimacy deficit had become an outright crisis. These events were much more than a heated policy dispute. The calling into question of deterrence and nuclearism can accurately be labeled a legitimacy crisis because these disputes touch upon primal state apparatus functions.

"Casual Utopianism" 

The Reagan Administration's response to the rapid decline in the legitimacy of nuclear weapons and deterrence was as unprecedented as its initial moves. When the nuclear freeze movement challenged the legitimacy of deterrence and nuclearism in a highly popular way, Reagan responded by adopting it as his own, ⁵¹ although he did not stop with a return to the nuclear-era rhetorical status quo of declaratory anti-nuclearism. Instead, much to the dismay and bewilderment of the other members of his administration, he sought to implement a radical anti-nuclear agenda. First, he launched the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as "Star Wars," to roll back or technologically repeal the nuclear revolution by "rendering nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." Then, at the Reykjavik Summit in March 1986, he agreed enthusiastically to deep disarmament proposals that had not been considered seriously by official groups for more than thirty years. ⁵²

The ease with which Ronald Reagan embraced the radical anti-nuclear critique, and then sought to implement it, reflected his own particular character and talents as well as the nature of his political constituency. Although never strong on details of policy, he had an extraordinarily keen sense of the popular psychology. Two recent analyses of Reagan and his presidency by political journalists Lou Cannon and Don Oberdorfer both document that Reagan's anti-nuclearism was deeply held and not just a public relations expedient. ⁵³ In his outlook and temperament he remained a Washington outsider. The Republican Party's long-standing ideology of opposition to large and uncontrollable governments in Washington always contained the risk that the national security state, as well as the social welfare state, might be delegitimated.

The response of the security state apparatus to Reagan's initiatives was overwhelmingly hostile. Reagan's Reykjavik initiatives were disavowed by the horrified and embarrassed members of the national security establishment, who favored traditional arms control aimed at stabilizing deterrence. James Schlesinger, whose career in the upper echelons of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Office of Management and Budget, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy makes him as close to a nuclear state spokesman as one could hope to find, scathingly faulted Reagan for the sin of "casual utopianism." ⁵⁴ From the standpoint of the national security state, both Reagan's ambitious version of Star Wars and deep disarmament were seen as fundamentally utopian, since both were based upon the premise that deterrence is unacceptable. As Richard Nixon, perhaps the most realpolitik  President of the postwar era observed: "At the Reykjavik summit, the Reagan Administration undermined public support for nuclear deterrence by advocating the idea of eliminating all nuclear weapons. We must renounce the Reykjavik rhetoric in unequivocal terms and explain to western publics the realities of the nuclear age." ⁵⁵ The very fact that they were seriously entertained in a bold fashion at an international summit by a popular leader with impeccable anti-communist national security credentials further threatened the statist legitimation of deterrence.

The state security apparatus also sought to redirect Star Wars to the "realistic" goal of shoring up deterrence rather than eliminating it. The conflicting agendas of those who wanted to secure the public and those who wanted to preserve state autonomy were clearly visible in the conflict over the re-direction of the Star Wars program: The state security apparatus sought to re-direct the program away from Reagan's goal of protecting population to one designed to protect missiles and military command centers.

The extraordinary shift of the Reagan Administration from the most extreme war strategist rhetoric to the most extreme nuclear one worldist program of the nuclear era was set up by a desire to close the gap between nuclear declaratory and operational policy. And, so, where Reagan began by attempting to bring rhetoric in line with traditional operational reality, he ended by attempting to bring reality in line with the utopian rhetoric.

In contrast to his predecessors, Reagan had not been adequately socialized into the institutional requirements of the Presidency during the nuclear era and the Cold War. During the 1980 election, Jimmy Carter and the Democrats argued that Reagan was not responsible enough on nuclear issues to occupy the office of the Presidency. This turned out to be both right and wrong in ways completely unexpected at the time. In failing to understand or respect the delicate balancing role of the Presidency in mediating the powerful cross-currents created by nuclear weapons, Reagan was indeed unsuited, or at least unprepared, to play the role of President as it had been defined by the nuclear statists. However, in pursuing a policy of actual rather than rhetorical anti-nuclearism, Reagan was arguably the first President of the nuclear era who sought to represent the interests of the public to the state, rather than the interests of the state to the public. Thus, like a bolt of lightening in a dark night, the Reagan episode illuminates brilliantly, if briefly, the basic structural forces and fields created by nuclear possession.

Civil Defense and Civic Activism 

Further insight into the deformation of state-civil society relations wrought by nuclear weapons can be seen by considering the politics of civil defense in the nuclear age. Compared to the Soviet Union, the United States invested relatively little in nuclear civil defense during the Cold War. ⁵⁶ Civil defense was one area of actual nuclear policy where the Reagan administration did seek to make an important departure from previous administrations. The strategic program of the early Reagan administration had five main components: 1) deployment of a new land-based heavy ICBM (the MX or "Peacekeeper"); 2) deployment of a new generation of ballistic missile submarines and missiles (the Trident); 3) procurement of a new generation of manned bombers (the B-1 and the B-2); 4) upgrades in the strategic command and control system; and 5) a greatly expanded program of civil defense. Of these five initiatives only the last--civil defense--was a major departure from the programs of the later Carter Administration. ⁵⁷ Upon entering office, the Reagan Administration assigned a relatively obscure agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to draw up plans for civil defense evacuations. FEMA was also directed to actually hold practice civil defense evacuations. ⁵⁸

This was more easily ordered than accomplished. Due to the federal character of the United States Constitution, FEMA had to convince local governments to cooperate in conducting the evacuation exercises. Governments might be willing, but FEMA's efforts to design and practice evacuations to be used in the event of a nuclear attack encountered stiff resistance from the exploding "grass-roots peace movement." These groups reasoned that civil defense would be an ineffective measure in the actual event of a nuclear war and, even more ominously, that the practice of nuclear evacuations would add to the illusion among both the public and the government that nuclear wars could be fought and survived. Because of their ability to readily influence the various local government bodies that actually had to authorize the plans and the practices, anti-nuclear groups were able to thwart most of FEMA's efforts. The result was that, after a year of fruitless effort, the Reagan Administration abandoned its civil defense initiative. Of the five nuclear modernization programs of the Reagan Administration, only the civil defense initiative was actually halted by the public uprising against nuclear weapons during the early 1980s.

The logic of the leaders of the peace movement in opposing the civil defense measures was curiously contradictory, and may have been ultimately counterproductive to their more basic goals. At the heart of the case against civil defense measures was the fear that practicing evacuations for nuclear war would have added to the legitimacy of nuclear weapons. But this conclusion defies common sense. Instead of generating public support, such exercises would be more likely to drive home to the public the harsh reality of their vulnerability to nuclear attack. Civil defense exercises would end nuclear reclusion, and the reality of insecurity in the nuclear era would be vividly experienced by the public. Civil defense practices would have constituted a mass, government-funded lesson in the vulnerability of the populace to nuclear annihilation. The peace movement leaders assumed not only that the public would fail to catch on to this fact but also that the public could be educated into the evils of various offensive weapons systems such as the MX. In reality, civil defense practices might well have provided the means for conversion of the generally quietistic and episodically eruptive public into a routinely activated and participating force in nuclear security politics.

With the civil defense program, the Reagan Administration inadvertently sabotaged the principle of nuclear reclusion that had kept the structural realities of the nuclear era from manifesting themselves as legitimacy crises. The blundering move to undo their own legitimacy was, however, short-lived and self-correcting. The peace movement quickly solved the Administration's problem for it by covering the gaping hole that had been opened in the screen of reclusion. Spared further traumatic exposure to the reality of its situation, the public soon returned to its slumber, able again to rest in peace in the cocoon of statist nuclear evasion.

Conclusions

Three conclusions are suggested. First, the "black box" of the units has been opened, and light has been shed light on the dynamics and dilemmas of nuclear security politics within nuclear possessed polities. The advent of nuclear explosives has fundamentally altered the relationship between the state apparatus and civil society, creating a nuclear legitimacy deficit . Nuclear weapons are revolutionary in their implications for the viability of states as security providers and, thus, of state-civil society relations, but this fact has not yet registered in a fundamental or revolutionary restructuring of polities. Rather than a revolution , there is a revolutionary challenge --a set of unresolved contradictions between the security imperatives of the nuclear world, the security approaches of states, and the security requirements of civil society. One important political consequence of this unresolved tension is the reduced legitimacy of states, particularly when they apply statist approaches to nuclear security issues. Because state apparatuses derive their legitimacy, at least in part, from their viability as providers of security, the unmet nuclear security challenge produces a chronic "legitimacy deficit" for states. How legitimacy deficits are politically expressed depends on the internal structure of the polity. This legitimacy deficiency is generated by the contradiction between statist approaches to security and the security imperatives of the nuclear world, and it cannot be eliminated or fully resolved except through a displacement of statist approaches to nuclear security--a change that no one polity can unilaterally achieve. It is possible, however, for this nuclear legitimacy deficit to be evaded and cloaked by a variety of stratagems, even if not actually resolved or permanently avoided by them. But such evasion and displacement cannot be achieved in all circumstances, and chronic nuclear legitimacy deficiencies can erupt periodically into full-fledged crises. On these crisis occasions, the public becomes highly aroused and the politics of nuclear weapons become supercharged with potential for far-reaching institutional change.

The ability of states to evade--at least for a while--the domestic political consequences of nuclear possession helps to solve an important theoretical puzzle in the nuclear one world model. If the state mode of providing security and protection has been rendered obsolete by the advent of nuclear weapons, then it could be expected that alternative institutional forms would emerge to take its place. States with realpolitik  orientations might persist after the demise of the real-state mode, but if they persist long enough, then doubt must be cast upon the basic proposition that they have been rendered unviable. Contradiction, while a vital analytic tool for understanding change in institutions, can degenerate into a convenient means of avoiding discomfirming evidence. However, if states have a menu of mechanisms for evading and managing the domestic political consequences of the obsolescence of the real-state mode, then an explanation is available for the persistence of the contradiction.

Second, Ronald Reagan and his administration are cast in a new light. The odd and unprecedented gyrations of the Reagan Administration on nuclear matters provides initial support for the proposition that nuclear weapons pose fundamental legitimacy problems for the states that possess them. Attacked from both the political Right and Left for deviations from orthodoxy, Reagan ultimately may have served as a better bellwether for the American polity's genuine security interests than either his political friends or enemies are prepared to recognize. His friends on the Right have yet to grasp that his radical anti-nuclearism was profoundly consistent with his general anti-statism. His enemies on the Left, highly critical of the imperialistic tendencies of American foreign policy, have yet to grasp that his radical anti-nuclearism, not the statism of realpolitkers Nixon and Kissinger, is the most consistent application of the core American tradition of republican anti-statism.

Third, and finally, the relationship between Realism and popular anti-nuclearism has been recast, and a new understanding has been achieved about the weaknesses and strengths of its security practices in the nuclear era and their interaction with domestic political structures. The insistence that the real-state be transformed into a component of a more general nuclear control system is based in Realism, but is significantly dependent for its realization upon popular mobilization. The political consequences of nuclear illegitimacy may not be so consistently felt as to constitute a major barrier to acquisition and possession of nuclear weapons by states, and even states embedded in polities with relatively strong traditions of civil society supremacy. The strategies available to states to evade the legitimacy burdens of nuclear weapons, rooted in the ease with which nuclear weapons lend themselves to reclusion, suggest that the nuclear revolution is unlikely to generate a political revolution within nuclear polities. Furthermore, the structurally rooted difficulties in sustaining a critical mass of organic intellectuals focused upon genuine nuclear security alternatives provides another hurdle to revolutionary institutional change.

Given that the effectiveness of nuclear reclusion and of popular peace movements are inversely proportional, new avenues for peace movement strategy to combat reclusion deserve consideration. Nuclear reclusion can be countered by institutionalizing public symbolic representations of nuclear reality, so that both the public and its leaders will never be able to forget that they sit eternally perched at the edge of a bottomless well of nuclear destructive energies. Such an agenda has lengthy precedents. States have long sought to instill the requisite patriotism and obedience in their subjects. And republics, unlike the purely liberal polities in which individual preferences are taken as given, have long sought to form civic personalities consistent with their institutional machinery, particularly the virtues of self-restraint and a suspicion of centralized power.

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Note 1: Colin Gray, The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era: Heartlands, Rimlands, and the Technological Revolution  (New York: Crane Russak, 1977); and Colin Gray, House of Cards: Why Arms Control Must Fail  (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) Back.

Note 2: Bernard Brodie, "War in the Atomic Age," and "Implications for Military Strategy," in Brodie ed., The Absolute Weapon  (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946); Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon  (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); and Charles Glazer, Analyzing Nuclear Strategy  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Back.

Note 3: John Herz, International Politics in the Atomic Era  (New York: Columbia University , 1959); Kenneth Boulding, Conflict and Defense: A General Theory  (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). Back.

Note 4: A good index of this disappearance is that no "nuclear one world" arguments appear in recent synoptic overviews of "security studies." See Joseph Nye Jr., and Sean M. Lynn-Jones, "International Security Studies: A Report of a Conference on the State of the Field," International Security  12, no. 4 (Spring 1988); and Stephen M. Walt, "The Renaissance of Security Studies," International Studies Quarterly  35, no. 2 (June 1991): 211-39. Back.

Note 5: Daniel Deudney, "Dividing Realism: Structural Realism versus Security Materialism on Nuclear Security and Proliferation," Security Studies  2, nos 3/4 (Spring/Summer 1993): 7-36; and Daniel Deudney, Pax Atomica: Planetary Geopolitics and Republicanism  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming). Back.

Note 6: For analysis of the multiple factors that contributed to the end of the Cold War, see: Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, "The International Sources of Soviet Change," International Security  16, no. 3 (Winter 1991/92). Back.

Note 7: "The US-Soviet competition is for all practical purposes a permanent feature of international relations." Back.

Note 8: John Lewis Gaddis, "International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War," International Security  17, no. 3 (Winter 1992/93): 5-58. Back.

Note 9: Patrick Glynn, Closing Pandora's Box  (New York: New Republic Books, 1990). Back.

Note 10: David Cortright, Peace Works: The Citizen's Role in Ending the Cold War  (Boulder: Westview, 1993). Back.

Note 11: Thus drawn, the real-state is an ideal type, and actual political orders will only be approximations of these features. Back.

Note 12: It should be noted that an additional assumption of this model is that the state apparatus is ultimately the security servant or agent of its citizens, a view shared by Realists and non-Realists alike. Back.

Note 13: Thus, in this formulation, legitimacy is not  a dependent variable of the first four functions and therefore deserves to be considered along with them. Back.

Note 14: The relationship between legitimacy and the ability to provide security has been well-stated by Herz (International Politics in the Atomic Age , p. 41): "For throughout history, we notice that the basic political unit has been that which actually was in a position to afford protection and security to human beings, i.e., peace within, through the pacification of individual and group relationships, and security from outside interference or control. People, in the long run, will recognize that authority, any authority, which possesses this power of protection." Back.

Note 15: In the "billiard-ball model" states "represent a closed, impermeable and sovereign unit, completely separated from all other states." Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics  (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), pp. 3-24. This image is similar to John Herz' "hard-shelled" vs "permeable" units; see International Politics . Back.

Note 16: David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), appendix, "Hobbes on International Relations," pp. 206-212. Back.

Note 17: Leopold von Ranke, "The Great Powers," in Theodore H. von Laue, Leopold Ranke: The Formative Years  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950). Back.

Note 18: Since the beginning of the nuclear era, many realist theorists have retreated from the demanding criteria for great power status laid down by the classical realists and instead postulated that great powers are defined by the quantity of power assets held by states relative to others in the system. See for example, Martin Wight, Power Politics  (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978); and Jack Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495-1975  (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983). Back.

Note 19: For the concept of the "national security constitution" see Harold Koh, The National Security Constitution  (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Back.

Note 20: Otto Hintze, "Military Organization and the Organization of the State," (1906) in Felix Gilbert ed., The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 215. Back.

Note 21: Thus it would be misleading to classify Hintze's argument as "second-image reversed," because the "organization of army and of warfare" is driven, at least in part, by technological realities not reducible to the interstate environment and its distinctive logics of interaction. Back.

Note 22: The two best general works in this area are both highly idiosyncratic and in need of redoing: Stanislov Andreski, Military Organization and Society  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); and Carroll Quigley, Weapons Systems and Political Stability  (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1983). Back.

Note 23: John Barton, "A Third Nuclear Regime," in David Gompert, et al., eds., Nuclear Weapons and World Politics  (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1977), p. 154. Back.

Note 24: Martin Carnoy, The State and Political Theory  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and William Connolly, ed., Legitimacy and the State  (New York: New York University Press, 1984). Back.

Note 25: Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis  (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975); Alan Wolf, The Limits of Legitimacy: Political Contradictions of Capitalism  (New York: Basic Books, 1977). Back.

Note 26: France is an example of a highly statist country where, in a number of issue areas, civil society has been subordinated to the state. Back.

Note 27: Henry Kissinger, "How to Deal with Gorbachev," Newsweek , March 2, 1987, p. 42. That Kissinger proved to be absolutely wrong in his prediction does not gainsay his noting the contradiction and its potential implications. Back.

Note 28: Reclusion is also the rule in the United Kingdom and, to the extent possible, was the case in West Germany. In the Soviet Union, where discussions of the "dilemmas of deterrence" rarely reached outside of state institutions, the state would parade its ICBMs through Red Square every May Day. This was less for the consumption of Soviet citizens in Moscow than for CIA analysts in Reston. Back.

Note 29: A third, but more localized, successful public mobilization against a nuclear deployment occurred during the 1980s, when the citizens of Utah and Nevada helped derail the Air Force's plans to deploy a massive system of MX missiles and shelters in thinly populated regions of the two states. Back.

Note 30: Robert Divine, Blowing on the Wind: the Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954-1980  (New York: Oxford, 1978); and Glenn T. Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Back.

Note 31: See Joel Primack and Frank von Hippel, "Stopping Sentinel," Advice and Dissent: Scientists in the Political Arena  (New York: New American Library, 1974), ch. 13. Back.

Note 32: The 1980s opposition across Europe to deployment of the "Euromissiles," and the rise of nuclear opposition in the Soviet Union after Chernobyl, reinforce the argument presented here. Back.

Note 33: On the propaganda dimensions of the Baruch Plan, see Thomas W. Graham, American Public Opinion on NATO, extended deterrence, and use of nuclear weapons: Future fission?  (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989). Back.

Note 34: Alva Myrdal, The Game of Disarmament  (New York: Pantheon, 1982, 2nd ed.). Back.

Note 35: The role of declaratory anti-nuclearism in overcoming the legitimacy deficit created by nuclear weapons possession has implications that go beyond domestic political dynamics. Advocates of the "nuclear revolution" hypothesis often cite the declaratory statements of political leaders as evidence for their claim that states have learned or absorbed basic facts about the nuclear world. If, however, such declarations serve the purpose of legitimating nuclear possession to domestic audiences, then they may not, in fact, be evidence for such adjustment. Back.

Note 36: Admittedly, this shift did not occur suddenly, inasmuch as, by 1939, the public's role had already been greatly reduced. Nonetheless, whereas World War II could not have been fought without the involvement of the country's citizens, World War III could have been and might still be. Back.

Note 37: Peter Douglas Feaver, Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States  (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). Back.

Note 38: Although France might seem to provide a counter-example to these observations, it does not. As suggested earlier, French étatisme  does not provide for a significant public role in that country's "security constitution." Public reaction to nuclear weapons policies at various times in the United Kingdom and West Germany, the latter not a nuclear state but certainly "nuclearized," tend to reinforce the argument I make here. Back.

Note 39: Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings  (New York: International Publishers, 1967). Back.

Note 40: This image of the preferences of military organizations is derived from Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine  (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), ch. 2. Back.

Note 41: Richard Betts, "The Concept of Deterrence in the Postwar Era," Security Studies  1, no. 1: 25. Back.

Note 42: It is always dangerous to assess those recent events for which additional information will become available, but a wealth of high-quality information is already available concerning this period. Back.

Note 43: For collections of such statements, see: Center for Defense Information, Nuclear War Fighting: Quotations by Reagan Administration Officials  (Washington D.C., 1983); and Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War  (New York: Random House, 1982). Back.

Note 44: R. Herman, "Rally, speakers decry cost of nuclear arms race," New York Times , June 12, 1982, p. A3; and Fox Butterfield, "Anatomy of the Nuclear Protest," New York Times Magazine , May 11, 1982, pp. 16-17, 33-35. Back.

Note 45: Daniel Yankelovitch and John Doble, "The Public Mood: Nuclear Weapons and the U.S.S.R.," Foreign Affairs , Fall 1984, pp. 33-46; and Daniel Yankelovitch, et al., eds., Voter Opinions on Nuclear Arms Policy  (New York: The Public Agenda Foundation/ The Center for Foreign Policy Development, 1984). Back.

Note 46: Adam M. Garfinkle, The Politics of the Nuclear Freeze  (Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1984). Back.

Note 47: Brent Scowcroft, "Strategic System Development and New Technology: Where Should We Go," New Technology and Western Policy  (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1985, Adelphi Paper 197), Part I, p. 9. Back.

Note 48: Jim Castelli, The Bishops and the Bomb: Waging Peace in a Nuclear Age  (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), text of the Bishops' 1983 pastoral letter. See also The United Methodist Bishops, In Defense of Creation: The Nuclear Crisis and a Just Peace  (Nashville, Tenn.: The Graded Press, 1986). Back.

Note 49: Richard Falk, "Nuclear Weapons and the Renewal of Democracy," in Avner Cohen and Steven Lee, ed., Nuclear Weapons and the Future of Humanity  (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allenheld, 1986). Back.

Note 50: Robert W. Tucker, The Nuclear Debate: Deterrence and the Loss of Faith  (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), pp. 14-15. Back.

Note 51: Leon Wieseltier, "Nuclear Idealism, Nuclear Realism," The New Republic , March 11, 1985, pp. 20-25. Wieseltier observed that the President had joined the peace movement "in the delegitimization of deterrence." Back.

Note 52: See Daniel Wirls, Buildup: the Politics of Defense in the Reagan Era  (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 133, 163-64. Back.

Note 53: Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime  (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); and Don Oberdorfer, The Turn: From Cold War to a New Era  (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991). Back.

Note 54: James Schlesinger, "Reykjavik and Revelations: A Turn of the Tide," Foreign Affairs  65, no. 3 (1987): 426-46. Schlesinger, who has been Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, head of the Office of Management and Budget, Secretary of Energy, Secretary of Defense, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency was (and is) as clearly qualified to represent the nuclear state security apparatus as anyone alive. His review of Reagan's foibles was as scathing as any emerging from the left. Back.

Note 55: Richard Nixon, "American Foreign Policy: The Bush Agenda," Foreign Affairs  68 (1988/89): 208-9. Back.

Note 56: B. Wayne Blanchard, American Civil Defense 1945-1984: The Evolution of Programs and Policies  (Emmitsburg, MD: National Emergency Training Center, 1985). Back.

Note 57: The MX, Trident, and C³I upgrades were Carter Administration programs, while the B-1 and B-2 were revivals of projects killed by the Carter Administration, more for reasons of domestic political coalition than strategic value. See Nick Kotz, The Wild Blue Yonder: Money, Politics and the B-1 Bomber  (New York: Pantheon, 1988). Back.

Note 58: FEMA was a direct descendent of the original civil defense agency established in the 1950s. That effort, which reached its culmination with the "shelter scare" of the early 1960s, was not much more successful than the Reagan Administration program. Back.

On Security