the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

100 strategic studies, deterrence and the cold warthe ‘S-curve’ from the late 1970s onwards. But as we will show in chapter6, the winding down of the Cold War did not take away an ongoingpreoccupation with new military technologies, and neither did it removeconcern about nuclear weapons. As the focus on superpower arsenalsreceded, that on horizontal proliferation became more prominent.As already noted, the ending of the Cold War posed a possible crisis forthe extremely successful institutionalisation of Strategic Studies, whichnow faced hard questions about its relevance, resourcing and bureaucraticsurvival on anything like its 1980s scale. It also derailed the internaldynamics of academic and policy debates. The 1980s intellectual driftof Strategic Studies into an unattractive choice between an existentialdeterrence dependent on irrationality, and a full-spectrum deterrencedependent on a sustained rationality so complex as to make its plausibilityquestionable, was simply swept away. With the Cold War gone, thesequestions became of only theoretical interest. And since Strategic Studieshad lived on its linkage to public policy questions, theoretical interest wasnot nearly enough to sustain engagement by the large establishment thathad grown up during the Cold War. Gone also was the whole problemof managing extended deterrence that had so much defined political andintellectual tensions across the Atlantic. With the Soviet Union disappearingas a threat, Europe no longer needed US protection. The problemwith NATO shifted from how to share the burdens and risks of extendeddeterrence to whether NATO was necessary at all, and if it was, then forwhat?With the end of the Cold War, Strategic Studies faced a crisis born ofthe very success that its marriage to the superpower nuclear rivalry hadgiven it. Despite this crisis, it was the Cold War development of ISS that setthe template for ‘international security’ to which all of the contemporaryand subsequent wideners and deepeners had to relate. But before we lookat how ISS rose from the ashes of the ending of the Cold War, let us turnto the Cold War approaches which questioned Strategic Studies’ readingof nuclear deterrence, the nature of the state, and the privilege accordedto state-centric, military security.