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Across the Nuclear Divide—Strategic Studies, Past and Present

A combination of accident and design has produced a transnational strategic studies community which has only the most casual acquaintance with strategic thought and action prior to 1945. In this article it is argued both that the continuities in international politics and strategy, preand post-1945, are far more important than are the discontinuities, and that therefore the disciplined study of pre-nuclear ideas and events could and should much improve our understanding of the structure of current and anticipated security problems. The identity of the political players changes, as do the characteristics of particular weapons, but such policy problem categories as the utility of force for the support of foreign policy, alliance management, the conduct of an arms race, the prosecution of limited war, arms control negotiations, and the accomodation of new weapon technologies, all have long pre-nuclear histories. Nuclear-age strategic theory has suffered severely from shallowness of its empirical base. Relatively few strategists today deny, in principle, the salience of pre-1945 thought and practice. But, historical consciousness of more than a very cosmetic variety continues to be the rare exception in contemporary strategic and arms control analysis. It is , of course, somewhat contrary to the American "style" which continues overwhelmingly to be pragmatic and optimistic in character, to suggest that the practice of bad old "power politics" may be traced back as far as human literary and archaeological records extend-the past and the present essentially are one in terms of statecraft. An historical memory that stops at a postulated great divide in 1945 encourages aspirations for "new eras" and the like. Since the past provides the only evidence upon which theories may be constructed, the time is long overdue for strategists and arms controllers (if these be separate categories) to seek out the relevant past in a systematic fashion for the purposes of policy-science today. (This is not to deny the value of historical enquiry pursued for its own sake; the trouble tends to be that historical research for its own sake requires a massive effort of translation before its findings are organized in ways at all useful for those facing contemporary policy problems.)