ABSTRACT
There was a school of thought in the 1950s which argued that the traditional mechanisms of the balance of power had been rendered obsolete by the advent of nuclear technology, and that nuclear deterrence represented a new and quite different method for regulating the international anarchy. Burns (1957:494-529) can be taken as exemplifying this approach. Against this were the views of those such as Snyder, who argued that ‘the balance of power theory is still generally valid and still a useful model of at least certain aspects of contemporary world politics. The new military technology has not terminated but only modified the balance of power process’ (Snyder, 1965:186). According to Snyder, what occurred after 1945 was the superimposition of a new system of equilibrium, whose use of phraseology like ‘the balance of terror’ reflected a continuing preoccupation with balance, upon the pre-nuclear balance of power system. The two systems operate according to different tendencies and principles and can be separated analytically, but in practice they are inextricably mixed in a new balance of power in which elements of the old coexist with the new’ (ibid.).
