How Realists and Liberals Learned to Love the Bomb

Abstract

Speaking of the atomic bomb's effect on international relations, Henry Kissinger writes that “Many familiar assumptions about war, diplomacy and the nature of peace will have to be modified before we have developed a theory adequate to the perils and opportunities of the atomic age." When Col. Paul Tibbets and his crew dropped their payload on Hiroshima, they fundamentally altered the international landscape. Outside of policy making circles, intellectuals waged their own struggle to make sense of the new world order and the adjustments it demanded in their models. International relations theory, in particular, had to recalibrate itself to the nuclear age. What is the meaning of collective security when atomic bombs are in play? What of the balance of power? How should states react in an anarchic international system made even murkier by mutual assured destruction? The atomic bomb can be expected to have an effect on both liberal and realist international relations (IR) theory. One might expect that Liberals, already agitating for peace and world government, would find their cause strengthened by the fear of nuclear annihilation; their arguments would then take on an urgency not previously seen. The Realist, on the other hand, while reciting their notions of the inevitability of conflict, will find said annihilation an issue powerful enough to rein in systemic tendencies for war. In fact, a survey of IR theory in the inter-war and immediate post-war periods shows that liberals tend to lose their idealist fervor and advocate policies more in line with Realist views. Realists often supports a less hard-line stance than before, but, as befits a paradigm as diverse as Realism, effects vary greatly from scholar to scholar, often in relation to his orientation as a Structural or Classical Realist. This paper takes a systematic look at IR theory from roughly 1930-1960 in an attempt to uncover the fundamental changes introduced by the atomic bomb. In some cases, scholars wrote on either side of World War II and the shifts are easy to see. In many others, we are forced to compare writers within the same paradigm on either side of the war to determine the evolution of IR theory. The changes wrought by the bomb can be seen in the basic tenets of each paradigm: ideas of collective security, balance of power, the inevitably of conflict, interdependence, and others. The individual focus of each intellectual means that, while each person's reaction to the nuclear age is different, a survey of sufficient breadth can reveal general trends. That said, we will see disparate and surprising developments: Liberals writing of the necessity of power politics, Realists advocating collective security, and at least one scholar favoring nuclear proliferation. IR theory, however, remains elastic enough that, even today, presidents call for a nuclear-free world even as specialists blithely predict an inevitable hegemonic conflict with nuclear China.