This chapter identifies ten lessons for international relations that emerge from the book.

This chapter analyzes the history of preventive attacks against nuclear programs. It identifies when nuclear latency invites military conflict. It includes four detailed case studies: US-considered use of military force against Iran, the North Korea Nuclear Crisis, Israel’s preventive strike against Syria, and the US-considered use of force against Syria.

This chapter addresses when nuclear latency leads to nuclear weapons proliferation and arms races. It shows that under certain conditions, nuclear latency can deter rivals from arming. In other situations, however, nuclear latency can foment nuclear weapons proliferation. It includes six case studies of nuclear proliferation: Argentina, Brazil, France, India, Pakistan, and South Africa.

This chapter provides an overview of the book.

This chapter traces India’s status concerns from independence in 1947 leading up to the advent of the NPT in the late 1960s. It examines India’s approach to nuclear weapons during this period and derives expectations for how India would react to an international treaty such as the NPT from two competing perspectives: material interests and IST. It tests these hypotheses through a detailed account, based on primary sources, of India’s approach to nuclear proliferation and positions taken in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) negotiations of 1954–1956 and in the Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament from1962 to 1969. It finds that although India faced a major nuclear threat from China, India supported nonproliferation and universal nuclear disarmament, so long as the international nuclear negotiations allowed symbolic equality with the great powers and the door to joining the nuclear club remained open. When the superpowers drafted an NPT that effectively froze the number of recognized nuclear powers for the next 25 years, Indian perceptions of the openness and fairness of the international order changed, leading India to reject the NPT and undertake the very costly and risky step of testing a nuclear weapon.

The Epilogue traces the decline of US survivors’ civil rights activism in the US and the increased trans-Pacific collaboration among American, Korean, Japanese survivors aimed at obtaining compensation from the Japanese government. This development, based on the era‘s notion of human rights, was shaped by the precedents set by Korean survivors. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Korean survivors successfully sued the Japanese government for its failure to treat Korean survivors fairly. As victims of the Japanese wartime empire, Koreans carried more leverage than Americans when they confronted the Japanese government. Japanese survivors, too, urged their government to extend benefits to non-Japanese survivors. As more survivors came together, both the US and Japanese governments exhibited a tenacious refusal to recognize the bombs‘ human cost. Ultimately, US survivors’ history shows how nation-states’ failure to grasp the nuclear injury continues to shape historical understanding, suppressing along the way the voices of people who have long been bridging the nations. Built on this failure is the misguided policy of nuclear buildup in the name of national security.

Current threats might include in particular the proliferation of nuclear weapons and terrorism as well as international crime, policing the oceans, the antics of cybergeeks, securing energy sources, climate change, economic challenges, and the protection of allies. Singly or in groups, these problems and issues scarcely justify the maintenance of a large military force in being, and complacency is, in general, a more fitting response than agitated, and particularly militarized, alarm. Proliferation has been of little practical consequence, and alarmed efforts to prevent it have proved to be very costly and may hamper the forging of a permanent normalization in Korea. Counterterrorism policy has been driven primarily by public opinion, not by an apt analysis of the threat. Cybergeeks may be able to commit sabotage, steal intelligence, or spread propaganda, but any military disruptions are likely to be minor and call more for a small army of counter-cybergeeks than for a large military. One possible use of American military forces in the future would be to deploy them under international authority to police destructive civil wars or to depose vicious regimes. However, this would not require a large number of troops and is unlikely to become routine.

In the wake of the Cold War, the formerly Communist countries in East Europe, with Western support and urging, took up capitalism and democracy with considerable alacrity. With the demise of the Soviet Union, there was a quest to identify new threats in the succeeding decade. Most of these, however, were already out there during the Cold War: proliferation, terrorism, drugs, oil dependence, and economic and environment “challenges.” A new opportunity brought forward by the ending of the Cold War was that former enemies could work together to police the world. Disciplined policing forces were effective in pacifying thug-dominated conflicts and in removing thuggish regimes in Panama, Somalia (at least at first), Rwanda, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Sierra Leone. And the Gulf War of 1991 chiefly showed how easy it is to run over an enemy that had little strategy, tactics, defenses, morale, or leadership. However, the deaths of tens of thousands in the war and in its immediate aftermath might have been avoided through negotiation. These ventures were mostly ad hoc, and it is much too grand to consider them to constitute exercises in “liberal hegemony” or a “liberal world order.”