Table Of ContentAtomic Anxiety
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Atomic Anxiety
Deterrence, Taboo and the Non-Use
of U.S. Nuclear Weapons
Frank Sauer
Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer,
Bundeswehr University Munich, Germany
© Frank Sauer 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-53373-9
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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2015 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-55399-0 ISBN 978-1-137-53374-6 (eBook)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sauer, Frank.
Atomic anxiety : deterrence, taboo and the non-use of U.S. nuclear
weapons / Frank Sauer (senior research fellow and lecturer, Universität der
Bundeswehr München, Germany).
pages cm
1. Nuclear weapons – Government policy – United States. 2. Nuclear
weapons – Social aspects – United States. 3. Nuclear weapons – United
States – Psychological aspects. 4. No first use (Nuclear strategy) 5.
Deterrence (Strategy) 6. Anxiety – Political aspects – United States. 7.
Taboo – Political aspects – United States. 8. United States – Military policy.
9. United States – Military policy – Decision making. I. Title.
UA23.S28 2015
355.02’170973—dc23 2015018872
Contents
Acknowledgments v ii
1 I ntroduction 1
2 E xplaining Nuclear Non-Use 8
2 .1 Nuclear deterrence 8
2.1.1 Theory: from paradox to nonsense 9
2.1.2 Strategy: the theory-practice divide 15
2.1.3 Concluding remarks 23
2 .2 Nuclear taboo 24
2.2.1 Taboo versus tradition 29
2.2.2 Taboo erosion 33
2.2.3 Taboo limitation 35
2.2.4 Concluding remarks 36
3 U nderstanding Nuclear Non-Use 38
3 .1 Explanatory synthesis? 38
3 .2 Explaining non-events 40
3.2.1 Nuclear deterrence, one more time 41
3.2.2 Nuclear taboo, one more time 47
3 .3 Understanding non-events 52
3.3.1 Methodology: making sense of abstinence 53
3.3.2 M ethod: deductive and inductive
software-aided coding 65
4 R evisiting Nuclear Non-Use 72
4 .1 Selecting sources 72
4 .2 E mpirical inquiry #1: John F. Kennedy and the
crises in Berlin and Cuba 75
4.2.1 Nuclear use according to plan 75
4.2.2 Nuclear use as final failure 81
4.2.3 Concluding remarks 93
v
vi Contents
4 .3 F ollowing the fear trail: conceptual reflections on
atomic anxiety 105
4.3.1 R evisiting empirical sources: the three
faces of fear 105
4.3.2 R eviewing pertinent literature: is atomic
anxiety old news? 108
4.3.3 C onceptualizing atomic anxiety: consequentiality,
appropriateness and emotion 122
4.3.4 S electing new sources: presidents, fear and
nuclear non-use 136
4 .4 E mpirical inquiry #2: twelve U.S. presidents and
the age of atomic anxiety 140
4.4.1 The long nuclear shadow 141
4.4.2 Anxiety and abstinence 154
4.4.3 Concluding remarks 163
4 .5 Reflecting on results 164
5 C onclusion 173
5 .1 I mplications for future research: cross-fertilizing
understanding and explaining 178
5 .2 I mplications for policymaking: beware of
complacency 180
Notes 184
References 188
Index 205
Acknowledgments
I have benefited from numerous people who have provided me with
inspiration, valuable insights and intellectual guidance over the past
couple of years. They have done so either in person or through their
writings, both with regard to this particular book project as well as above
and beyond that. First and foremost, I would like to thank Carlo Masala
and Gunther Hellmann for their continued support. In addition to that,
I am grateful to (in alphabetical order) Benjamin Herborth, Gert Krell,
Richard Ned Lebow, Harald Müller, Niklas Schörnig, Stephan Stetter,
Nina Tannenwald and William Walker.
I would also like to thank Eleanor Davey Corrigan and Hannah
Kašpar at Palgrave Macmillan for their support as well as the two
anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions
on the manuscript.
Thanks to Munich’s Westpark, I had a beautiful place to run while
writing this book – which is what kept me sane, especially while coding
the material for the empirical chapters.
Sebastian Enskat deserves special thanks. Not only is he a very good
friend but he is as brilliant a sounding board and conversation partner
as can be.
I am deeply grateful to my parents for the opportunities they have
given me. Lastly and most importantly, I would like to thank my wife
Eva Herschinger. She not only read the manuscript twice and provided
countless suggestions for improvements but gave me constant support
in a long research process with many ups and downs. I hope that our
daughter, Marie, who is ten weeks old as of this writing, may grow up to
live in a world free from atomic anxiety.
vii
1
Introduction
Atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. ‘Wouldn’t it
be an odd thing if these were the only two atomic bombs ever dropped?’,
General Carl A. Spaatz (quoted in Life, 1945, p. 25) wondered back then.
As it happens, nuclear weapons were never used again. This book is about
this oddity.
Looking back at seven decades of nuclear non-use, some might find
this not so extraordinary. After all, most of us probably take for granted
that nuclear weapons are not to be detonated in war. But even while we
may have gotten accustomed to this, questions arise as soon as one takes
a step back and recalls history. What about the Cold War, the nuclear
arms race? Why did the superpower confrontation never go nuclear?
What about other wars such as the one in Vietnam? Why did the U.S.
fight a protracted and bloody conventional war there, instead of simply
ending things with one or two atomic blows?
The remarkable fact that decision-makers in (warring) nuclear states
continuously a bstained from using their ‘super weapon’ ever since 1945
becomes even more puzzling when the pace of technical development
is factored in. After all, not only did the hydrogen bomb quickly join its
atomic predecessor, dwarfing the explosive force of the fission bombs
by the awe-inspiring power of thermonuclear fusion. Smaller, tactical
nuclear weapons were also soon at hand, tailored to suit the military’s
every need in the decades laden with conflict after 1945. Pausing and
thinking for a moment about the non-use of nuclear weapons against
this backdrop, one cannot help but wonder.
Hence I pose the following question: w hat can explain the persistent
non-use of nuclear weapons after 1945, and how can we better understand (the
causes of) this nuclear abstinence? This two-part question will be pursued
with the help of three specific queries, namely: What explains nuclear
1
2 Atomic Anxiety
non-use and how do the existing explanatory concepts approach the
phenomenon? Do the factors invoked by existing explanations as causes
of nuclear non-use interact in decision-making practice, and if so, how?
Lastly, are there other facets of nuclear abstinence that have so far not
been analyzed systematically?
Regarding the first half of my two-part question, the bit asking for
what can explain nuclear non-use, there seems to be a simple answer:
luck. Robert McNamara and James G. Blight, for instance, reached the
following conclusion in their assessment of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
arguably one of the closest calls in regards to nuclear war erupting:
‘[W]hile the missile crisis was well-managed, under very trying circum-
stances, the escape from it without a major war, even a nuclear war, seems
nothing short of miraculous. In the end we lucked out’ (McNamara/
Blight, 2002, p. 2).
Luck may have been more involved with humankind’s survival of the
nuclear age so far than we would like to admit to ourselves. But this is
not only an unsettling notion. It is also hard to believe. A lucky streak
persisting for seven decades seems extremely unlikely. And as a matter of
fact, there are two more plausible explanations for nuclear non-use.
The first and most widely known explanation is n uclear deterrence. In
this line of thought, the mutual threat of retaliation with equal means
kept – and keeps – nuclear weapons from being used by making the
costs involved unbearably high (see e.g. Morgan, 2003; Freedman,
2004). Enter Nina Tannenwald. She argues that the deterrence account is
‘inadequate’, ‘insufficient’ and ‘incomplete’ (Tannenwald, 2007, pp. 2,
30–38, 55, 71), which is why she advocates ‘a normative element [to]
be taken into account’ (Tannenwald, 1999, p. 433) – a prohibitive norm
against nuclear use for which she coined the term n uclear taboo. Nuclear
deterrence and the nuclear taboo provide two well-developed explana-
tions for why nuclear weapons have not been used since Hiroshima and
Nagasaki (and an additional perspective, the t radition of non-use, will be
discussed later). That seems plenty. So why even bother with nuclear
non-use again?
I argue that the current state of research is not entirely satisfying.
Both explanations share similar blind spots resulting from the way they
approach the phenomenon; hence, serious difficulties and question
marks remain. Also, as I will argue as this study dives more deeply into
the issue of nuclear non-use, there are important facets of the phenom-
enon that literature in the field has not yet systematically accounted
for – most importantly, the importance of human emotion. In that
sense, this book not only offers an opportunity to rethink the non-use
