The nuclear balance has produced a paradoxical impact on the international order. The historic balance of power had facilitated the Western domination of the then-colonial world; by contrast, the nuclear order—the West’s own creation—had the opposite effect. The margin of military superiority of advanced countries over the developing countries has been incomparably larger than at any previous period in history. But because so much of their military effort has been devoted to nuclear weapons, whose use in anything but the gravest crisis was implicitly discounted, regional powers could redress
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This only is true if the military is accountable to a body politic. Why did the USSR, as an example of an undemocratic totalitarian state, exit their conflict in Afghanistan?
