Soon after nuclear weapons devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bernard Brodie and several colleagues wrote The Absolute Weapon, which predicted that the atomic bomb would revolutionize international politics. In The Absolute Weapon Revisited, a group of noted scholars explores the contemporary role of nuclear weapons in the world after the end of the Cold War. Although superpower rivalry has faded, the complexities of living with nuclear weapons remain. Working from different theoretical perspectives, the contributors offer a set of provocative assessments of nuclear deterrence and the risks of nuclear proliferation and disarmament. Some argue that assured destruction capabilities remain important, while others argue that nuclear deterrence will be increasingly irrelevant. Arms control, crisis stability, and continuity and change in nuclear doctrine as well as new issues such as virtual nuclear states and information warfare, are some of the issues addressed by the contributors to The Absolute Weapon Revisited. The contributors are Zachary Davis, Colin S. Gray, Richard J. Harknett, Ashok Kapur, Robert Manning, William C. Martel, Eric Mlyn, John Mueller, J. V. Paul, George Quester, and James J. Wirtz. This book will be of interest to scholars, policymakers and students interested in issues of nuclear strategy and deterrence, arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament, international security and peace studies.

Commentators frequently call the United States an empire: occasionally a benign empire, sometimes an empire in denial, and often a destructive empire. Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman asserts instead that, because of its unusual federal structure, America has performed the role of umpire since 1776, compelling adherence to rules that gradually earned collective approval.

This provocative reinterpretation traces America’s role in the world from the days of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt to the present. Cobbs Hoffman argues that the United States has been the pivot of a transformation that began outside its borders and before its founding, in which nation-states replaced the empires that had dominated history. The “Western” values that America is often accused of imposing were, in fact, the result of this global shift. American Umpire explores the rise of three values—access to opportunity, arbitration of disputes, and transparency in government and business—and finds that the United States is distinctive not in its embrace of these practices but in its willingness to persuade and even coerce others to comply. But America’s leadership is problematic as well as potent. The nation has both upheld and violated the rules. Taking sides in explosive disputes imposes significant financial and psychic costs. By definition, umpires cannot win.

American Umpire offers a powerful new framework for reassessing the country’s role over the past 250 years. Amid urgent questions about future choices, this book asks who, if not the United States, might enforce these new rules of world order?

Most observers agree that the global arena is in the midst of multiple changes. The elements that create and intensify global interdependencies have been expanding rapidly, generating questions about the viability of the state and the viability of the state-centric system that has existed for over 500 years, as well as what sorts of structures and behaviors might replace them. And yet much of the analysis is not helpful in understanding the condition of the international system because it either fails to define the meaning of terms such as interdependence and order or treats these as new problems ignoring many important ideas that have developed over the years about international politics. One of our most accomplished scholars in international affairs, Harvey Starr offers a fresh and original analysis of the nature of the international system. Starr argues that the global system can best be understood as the consequence of states adapting to changing interdependencies. States do remain important in this system, but the reality they adapt to is changing. Thus the environment surrounding states is important not because it is "anarchic," as argued by structural realists such as Waltz, but because environmental conditions have changed, thereby changing the meaning and significance of such structural characteristics as "anarchy." Starr argues that we must recognize that the modes by which states adapt to change in the international system lead to changes in both the states themselves and in their environment. This book will appeal to scholars of international relations in political science and economics as well as to policy makers and analysts interested in understanding change in the international system.