the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

68 strategic studies, deterrence and the cold wartheory and nuclear deterrence, it had the appearance of being methodologicallycoherent, and because of the explicit link to public policy it wasalso generously funded. This ‘golden age’ was the formative period of thenew sub-field, and therefore defined the position from which subsequentstudies of the subject had to proceed.The main goal of this chapter is to show in more detail how the fivedriving forces can explain both the initial demand for ISS, its first conceptuallydriven decade and its continued evolution through the golden ageof Strategic Studies and into the later parts of the Cold War. The detailedstory of how nuclear strategy evolved during its first four decades hasbeen told by Freedman (1981a), and it is not our intention to repeat thateffort here. Instead, we want to locate the main themes of that literaturewithin a broad brush story of the historical background to the literatureof ISS. But the Cold War period is not just interesting as history. It establishedthe meaning of what ‘international security’ is about, and did sowith sufficient depth that this still serves as the centre of gravity aroundwhich the many subsequent widening and deepening debates within ISSrevolve.Great power politics: the Cold War and bipolarityThe Cold War emerged during the mid-to-late 1940s as the new powerstructure created by the outcome of the Second World War settled intoplace. Its two big defining features came into play almost simultaneously:nuclear weapons and a rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union. Thisrivalry was made exceptionally intense not only because they were the bigwinners of the 1939–45 war, overawing all of the other erstwhile greatpowers, but also because they were the champions of mutually exclusiveideologies (democratic capitalism, totalitarian communism) each ofwhich claimed to own the future of humankind. This rivalry, and thefact that the US and the Soviet Union quickly became by far the largestholders of nuclear weapons, was captured in the concepts of superpowerand bipolarity. One enduring question of both the Strategic Studies andIR theory debates was whether the simple fact of bipolarity, or the existenceof nuclear weapons, did more to explain the character of the ColdWar (Waltz, 1964; Goldgeier and McFaul, 1992: 469, 490). Was bipolaritystable simply because a two-party, zero-sum game eliminated much of theuncertainty and possibility of miscalculation from superpower relations,as Waltz (1979) so famously maintained? Or was bipolarity intrinsicallyunstable, as suggested by Classical bipolarities: wars to the death between