ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to broaden and deepen understanding of the nexus between thermonuclear weapons and realism by examining how, during the thermonuclear revolution, nuclear realists came to understand their intellectual vocation as an obligation to question and criticize a distinct Cold War marriage between science, military technology and rationality. Nicholas Guilhot has argued that during the 1950s the character of realism changed as a younger generation of theorists and strategists trained in cybernetics, game theory and systems theory 'provided new theoretical languages adapting political realism to the Sputnik age'. Yet the critique of nuclear militarism they developed during the 1950s and early 1960s, and in particular that aspect of their critique that related to the intertwining of epistemology and ethics that informed the invention, operation, maintenance and deployment of this hyper-modern technology, also broadened their purview and sharpened their grasp of a range of social and political issues.
