ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the treatment of culture in the first wave of scholarship after 1945. It then shows how theorists of organizational culture have contributed to this scholarship. The chapter proposes that scholars who study cultures in relation to each other have offered important insights—by juxtaposing civilian and military cultures, and more recently, the domestic and international cultures of nuclear safety and security. While Kenneth Waltz's rationalism and optimism about deterrence ruled the roost in political science, scholars in other disciplines were laying bare the dysfunctional culture surrounding nuclear weapons themselves. The chapter reviews several thoughtful analyses of the sources and effects of organizational culture. The organizational culture viewpoint remains blinkered unless it is broadened to encompass interactions with the national, political, social, and economic context. Scholars of civil–military relations have tended to avoid discussing nuclear issues, mainly because the United States was for a long time the only country for which data could be obtained.
