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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Nuclear War, edited by Fox and Groarke, is one of five recent anthologies containing new essays by philosophers on the subject of nuclear war. The Blake and Pole volumes, containing essays mainly by British philosophers, are distinguished by unrelenting and comprehensive opposition to British and American policy, and by the fame of the contributors, which include Anthony Kenny, Michael Dummett, and Bernard Williams. The Chicago volume contains a number of excellent papers by philosophers and the added bonus of nine papers by established specialists in national security issues; it attempts, with partial success, to cover the full range of strategic nuclear options. The Cohen and Lee and the Fox and Groarke volumes consist largely of papers by strategic outsiders far from the centres of political power; the debate in these volumes is not between the principal versions of nuclear deterrence but between nuclear deterrence in any form and some scheme that transcends the present arrangement of mutually deterring superpowers. Of these last two books, Cohen and Lee contains relatively longer and more detailed essays.
1 The others are: Blake, Nigel, Pole, Kay, eds., Dangers of Deterrence (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983)Google Scholar; Blake, Nigel, Pole, Kay, eds., Objections to Nuclear Defense (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984)Google Scholar; Hardin, Russell, Mearsheimer, John, Dworkin, Gerald, Goodin, Robert, eds., Nuclear Deterrence: Ethics and Strategy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Cohen, Avner, Lee, Steven, eds., Nuclear Weapons and the Future of Humanity (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1986)Google Scholar.
2 American megatonnage peaked around 1960, and has since declined by 75 per cent. (The reason for the reduction is that to destroy targets—not the human race—accuracy is more important than explosive force, and heavy warheads produce inaccuracy.) If the Nuclear Winter hypothesis is correct, we can expect a large scale nuclear war to cause two billion deaths, but this is still not omnicide.
3 Gauthier, David, “Deterrence, Maximization, and Rationality”, Ethics 95/3 (04 1985)Google Scholar.
4 In the jargon, “minimal” deterrence is the maintenance of second strike capacity without redundancy in delivery systems. “Finite” deterrence is the policy of using nuclear weapons only to deter first strikes.
5 See my “Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence”, in Moral Problems, ed. Rachels, James (New York: Harper and Row, 1975) and “The Moral Case for Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament”, Philosophy and Social Criticism (Autumn 1984)Google Scholar.