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Strange stability: how cold war scientists set out to control the arms race and ended up serving the military-industrial complex
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DOI：10.1093/ia/iiag096.png)
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Abstract
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The phrase ‘strategic stability’ has long dominated conversations about nuclear weapons, sparking intense debate over what the term means and what force postures are more or less stabilizing. In Strange stability, Benjamin Wilson provides an important new intervention to this conversation, tracing the conceptual history of strategic stability and demonstrating that the more interesting question is not what the term means, but what function it serves. By providing a comprehensive history of Cold War intellectual thought, Wilson argues that the average nuclear weapon expert archetype used strategic stability to turn political problems into pseudo-scientific arguments. Wilson puts forward ‘the myth of technocratic restraint’, arguing that individuals who came up with conceptual metaphors that characterized the Cold War were products of the military-industrial complex (MIC) rather than the restrainers of Armageddon they have previously been made out to be (p. 6). As the world enters a fundamentally new post-Cold War era with no remaining arms control agreements, Strange stability shows us how the future nuclear order will likely evolve: as an unstoppable ‘research and development (R&D) machine’ geared towards superiority rather than disarmament (p. 304).
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