Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance / Edition 1

by Richard K. Betts Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University

Overview

"In numerous crises after World War II—Berlin, Korea, the Taiwan Straits, and the Middle East—the United States resorted to vague threats to use nuclear weapons in order to deter Soviet or Chinese military action. On a few occasions the Soviet Union also engaged in nuclear saber-ratling. Using declassified documents and other sources, this volume examines those crises and compares the decisionmaking processes of leaders who considered nuclear threats with the commonly accepted logic of nuclear deterrence and coercion.

Rejecting standard explanations of our leader's logic in these cases, Betts suggests that U.S. presidents were neither consciously blufffing when they made nuclear threats, nor prepared to face the consequences if their threats failed. The author also challenges the myth that the 1950s was a golden age of low vulberability for the United Stateas and details how nuclear parity has, and has not, altered conditions that gave rise to nuclear blackmail in the past.

"

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815709350
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	07/01/1987
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.68(d)

Table of Contents

1.	Risks, Threats, and Rationales	1
	Theory and Practice	3
	Analytical Issues	16
2.	Lower-Risk Cases	22
	The Berlin Blockade, 1948	23
	The Korean War, 1950-53	31
	Asian Crises, 1954-55	48
	Suez, 1956	62
	Lebanon and the Taiwan Straits, 1958	66
	Soviet-Chinese Border Clashes, 1969	79
3.	Higher-Risk Cases	82
	The Berlin Deadline Crisis, 1958-59	83
	The Berlin Aide-Memoire Crisis, 1961	92
	The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962	109
	The Middle East War, 1973	123
	The Carter Doctrine, 1980	129
4.	Brinks and Balances: Interests, Vulnerability, Resolve	132
	Right Makes Might? The Balance of Interests and Resolve	133
	The Nuclear Balance before Parity: Myth of a Golden Age	144
	Did the Bomb Work "Both Ways"?	172
5.	Parity: Change, Continuity, Confusion	180
	Equivocal Views of Equivalence	182
	Parity and Nuclear First Use	195
6.	Is There a Future for Nuclear Coercion?	212
	The Past	213
	Future Cases?	220
	Index	235

Editorial Reviews

YA A book about the basic politics involved in nuclear disarmament, or how we built up our nuclear stockpiles and now how we go about reducing them. Betts gives a chronological perspective beginning with the late 1940s and the Cold War until the present day. He highlights several major events for each decade (including the Berlin Blockade, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Middle East War of 1978), focusing on the United States and Soviet negotiations only. All of the pertinent historical information is clearly outlined and discussed. Betts' major thesis is that major governmental powers were not bluffing when they threatened using nuclear weapons, but that they may not have been willing to carry out that threat.Karl Penny, Houston Public Library

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