The Vision and the Steps: Iran, Weaponless Nuclear Deterrence and a World Free of Nuclear Weapons

From Anne Harrington's latest article, she writes, "From its inception, nuclear strategy has been a profoundly ahistorical field. Only recently have scholars begun to exploit the wealth of evidentiary knowledge generated during the Cold War, whether that be in the form of diplomatic history or creating data sets against which to test rational choice models. Mining that data has revolutionary potential. Providing an evidentiary basis against which to assess theories of nuclear deterrence and nonproliferation holds out the possibility not only of reinvigorating a stale intellectual debate, but of fundamentally reconfiguring what we believe to be true about nuclear deterrence and how it operates."

She then asks the question: "How do we grab hold of the revolutionary potential of the knowledge now available to us without becoming imprisoned within the boundaries of the past?"