冷戦と核兵器

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other as arch enemies and yet avoided direct military engagements. According to some analysts, the development of nuclear weapons did much to arouse, intensify, and/or perpetuate the hostility between the two. It is commonsensical, moreover, that the growth of nuclear stockpile dramatically increased the danger that the U. S. -Soviet confrontation might someday result in a global conflagration.<br>On the other hand, nuclear forces contributed to the absence of hot war between the superpowers. Among other things, their accumulation of nuclear arms may well have strengthened the stability of the international system by reinforcing its bipolar structure. The presence of nuclear weapons doubtless induced the leaders in Washington and Moscow to act with the utmost caution in crisis situations, thereby allowing for “rules of the game” and even “security regimes” to evolve.<br>Divergence of opinion on whether the development of nuclear weapons has transformed the nature of world politics has underlain the debates about the utility of nuclear threats in superpower crises that recurred in the heyday of the Cold War. The “nuclear revolution” thesis asserts that the inevitability of mutual devastation has made any attempt to fight and win a nuclear war totally irrational. Its proponents either minimize the significance of nuclear threats or attribute their effects to the “balance of resolve” between the U. S. and Soviet leaders. Those opposed to the “nuclear revolution” thesis deny the inevitability of annihilation and contend that victory in nuclear conflict can rationally be pursued. In their view, the effects of nuclear threats derive from the “balance of [nuclear] power.”<br>The disagreements on the nature of nuclear world have also affected the disputes over certain criteria for peacetime nuclear policy. Developed mostly in the latter half of the Cold War period, those criteria include the enhancement of “strategic stability, ” the maintenance of “extended deterrence, ” the control of “vertical” proliferation, and the prevention of “horizontal” proliferation. In particular, challenges to the orthodox interpretation of “strategic stability” and to the main features of strategic arms control in the 1970s and 1980s highlighted the absence of consensus on the validity of the “nuclear revolution” thesis.