NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND WARFARE

AFTER THE COLD WAR

The story so far:

$ The ‘core’ of the Cold War system became increasingly set in stone, although
within the ‘superpower condominium’ the arms race continued.

$ But that core became more and more irrelevant as the ‘periphery’, including the
Third World but also to some extent Europe, became more fluid and fragmented
and less controllable from the centre.

$ Thus the Cold War became a tug-of-war between centripetal and centrifugal forces,
with the core becoming increasingly irrelevant to the day-to-day agenda of
international politics and the periphery increasingly dominating that agenda.

THREE DEVELOPMENTS
1. Nuclear arms control comes back into fashion
$ The ‘baroque arsenal’ is increasingly seen as unthinkable; scenarios of ‘nuclear
winter’, etc., in the 1980s
$ The INF Treaty sets the scene not only for nuclear arms agreements but also
conventional arms control
$ However, attempts to develop detailed new agreements on banning testing and
on non-proliferation bump up against both old and new constraints
$ The Clinton Administration and defence policy — rethinking or drift?
$ Two types of potential proliferation: (a) smaller powers (India, Pakistan, etc.)?;
(b) non-state actors (incl. terrorists)?

2. High-tech AND low-tech warfare:

the so-called ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’
$ The Gulf War and precision weaponry
$ The ‘flexibilisation’ of war from low-tech to high-tech — graduated deterrence
in conventional warfare?
$ The United States and the dilemma of coalition-building: hegemony and
unilateralism
$ Back to the future: the NMD
$ Europe: ‘military pygmy’ (Lord George Robertson)?
$ Other big-gish powers? Japan? Canada? Australia? etc.

These developments are still in the melting pot: power being reconfigured as we speak

3. The real sources of warfare and violence today: globalisation, non-

state actors and the ‘new security dilemma’
What is the NSD? The traditional security dilemma and the new security dilemma

Underlying factors/wider trends:

$ economic globalisation
$ the ‘death of ideology’
$ multiculturalism and postmodernism
$ transnational governance

Civil wars, ethnic wars, cross-border wars, terrorism, etc.

Towards a new medievalism in international politics?

Not merely ‘multipolarity’, but a potentially unstable combination of centripetal and

centrifugal forces struggling over the periphery

$ unipolarity and fragmentation