the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

peace research and arms control 109and those political connections were a substantial part of what alienatedPeace Research and Strategic Studies.The technological imperative: the nuclear revolution in military affairsAgain in parallel with Strategic Studies, Peace Research and Arms Controlwere in large part motivated by, reacting to, and trying to influence,developments in military technology. The dominant driver was nuclearweapons and what to do about them. For orthodox strategists, the drivingforce of the ever-unfolding nuclear revolution was how to respond innational security terms to new capabilities that either had, or might soon,come into the hands of the enemy. For most Peace Researchers, andArms Controllers, this problem was either paralleled, or overridden, byseeing nuclear weapons themselves as the main source of threat, andhumankind as a referent object with an equal or greater claim to survivalthan that of states. While there was no doubt that the two superpowersposed mortal threats to each other, as their nuclear arsenals expandedto tens of thousands of warheads, some became more concerned aboutthe threat that unleashing such arsenals would pose to human existence.For the first time humankind had attained the capacity to commit speciessuicide. Given the hair-trigger preparedness for war on both sides, and thecomplexity and fallibility of their interlocked warning and command andcontrol systems, there was some risk that humankind would terminateitself through the potential for accident that was built into the design ofMAD and the whole project of nuclear deterrence. Among other things,the 1962 Cuba Missile Crisis, a formative and critical event for PeaceResearch as well as Strategic Studies, had shown just how easily andquickly the superpower confrontation could be brought to the brink ofnuclear war. Thus, while one side of the ISS literature pursued the problemof how to make nuclear deterrence work as a national security strategy,another side increasingly saw nuclear weapons and deterrence strategies(especially maximum ones) as posing their own distinctive threat to thesurvival of all human beings regardless of ideology.It is a theme of this book that, despite its increasing diversity, ISS canbe understood as a single conversation organised around a core concernwith international security. Surprisingly perhaps, nowhere does thiscoherence become more obvious then when one looks at those PeaceResearch and Arms Control literatures of the Cold War that focused onmilitary technology. Despite what was frequently strong political hostilitybacked up by institutional differentiation (see below), the actual agendas