ABSTRACT
Columbia University Press published not one but two classics of International Relations (IR) in 1959. The best-known is undoubtedly Kenneth N. Waltz's Man, the State and War, which fleshed out the three images that generations of scholars and their students have since deployed to make sense of war and international politics. Despite its popularity and favourable reception at the time, the second book has not achieved quite the same status. International Politics in the Atomic Age (IPAA) by John H. Herz (1908–2005) is nevertheless a classic by virtue of its groundbreaking analysis of the nuclear revolution and its impact on the theory and practice of world politics. 1 Whereas Waltz's work foreshadowed a new systematic and social scientific brand of (neo-)realism, IPAA was the first sustained and durable attempt to ponder what realism might mean in the atomic age.
