LAUSR

In The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy, Matthew Kroenig presents the reader with a research puzzle he sets out to resolve: ‘Why does the United States pursue military nuclear advantages if the costs are so high? Is US policy irrational? Or are these costs being exaggerated by the opponents of America’s nuclear forces?’ (2018: 190). His unambiguous answer is that American policy is not only rational but also virtuous to the extent that it has pursued nuclear superiority and pressed the advantages it confers in games of brinksmanship. Indeed, for all its rigorous application of positivist research methods, a normative commitment to nuclear primacy incontestably animates the book, counselling American leaders to seize the present opportunity to establish a new dominance in atomic weaponry. To our mind, Kroenig’s empirical and normative case for nuclear hegemony is vitiated by a radically unempirical leap of faith that supposes nuclear actors to be consistently rational and that the world obeys that same rigid apodictic account of rationality, preserving us from the worst. In this review, we will endeavour to unpack the internal logic of the book’s argument and show how that logic and the corresponding dismissal of the ‘downsides’ of nuclear superiority rely on ignoring the possibility that the world may be more chaotic and less predictable than Kroenig wants it to be. At the outset, Kroenig asserts that a variety of nuclear war scenarios habitually thought to fall under the common umbrella of ‘mutually assured destruction’ can and should be analytically distinguished for their decisive strategic import. Indeed, he contends that the willingness of a state to risk nuclear war increases significantly when what we might call the ‘balance of nuclear death’ vis-à-vis a rival is favourable to it, even where this would entail incurring tens of millions of