ABSTRACT
Lawrence Freedman concludes his celebrated history of nuclear strategy with a ringing declamation: ‘c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la stratégie’.1 The analysis here offers a full-frontal challenge to Freedman’s judgement. In this book the nuclear revolution, actually revolutions, is treated as strategic behaviour, generically identical to the Napoleonic and First World War RMAs. Of course, Freedman has a good point to convey. Writing towards the end of the Cold War, he reasons as follows:
At the end of over 40 years of attempts at constructing nuclear strategies one is forced to the conclusion that there has been a move to the analysis of second-and third-order issues. If strategic thought in the future is to consist of no more than permutations of old concepts in response to new military capabilities, or the exigencies of arms control negotiations in a desperate attempt to preserve the status quo, then it may have reached a dead end. For the position we have reached is one where stability depends on something that is more the antithesis of strategy than its apotheosis-on threats that things will get out of hand, that we might act irrationally, that possibly through inadvertence we could set in motion a process that in its development and conclusion would be beyond human control and comprehension.2
