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Nuclear Myths and Political Realities
Abstract
Two pervasive beliefs have given nuclear weapons a bad name: that nuclear deterrence is highly problematic, and that a breakdown in deterrence would mean Armageddon. Both beliefs are misguided and suggest that nearly half a century after Hiroshima, scholars and policy makers have yet to grasp the full strategic implications of nuclear weaponry. I contrast the logic of conventional and nuclear weaponry to show how nuclear weapons are in fact a tremendous force for peace and afford nations that possess them the possibility of security at reasonable cost.
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Citations
Cited by
The Myth of Cyberwar: Bringing War in Cyberspace Back Down to Earth
Gartzke, E. (2013) · International Security · doi:10.1162/isec_a_00136 · Cited by 396
Metadata
- Authors
- Waltz, K. N.
- Venue
- American Political Science Review
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 1990-09
- Volume
- 84
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 730-745
- ISSN
- 0003-0554 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5943
- OpenAlex
- W2145326714
- Cited by
- 381
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 57.12
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Nuclear Myths and Political Realities. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/1962764
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- Waltz, K. N. (1990). Nuclear Myths and Political Realities. American Political Science Review. https://doi.org/10.2307/1962764
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
