Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy Quotes

“In the past decade, the distance between those who see nuclear disarmament as the best policy for global peace and stability and those who see nuclear deterrence as the cornerstone of the world order has increased. The division is often stark and binary, with little middle ground, save for the world's greatest nuclear power, the United States, who confusingly appears to pursue both, mutually exclusive policies simultaneously.”
― Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy

“We think deterrence works. The problem is that, notwithstanding the confident claims of countless theorists, including those reviewed here, we do not really know why nuclear bombs have not been dropped since 1945, or at the very least, we cannot prove our theories and instincts. Was it good statesmanship? Was Kenneth Waltz right, and nuclear weapons really are the great stabilizers? Or perhaps it was just luck? As is often said about the inadvisability of testing nuclear deterrence failures, we have never run the experiment, and we hope we never will.”
― Francis J. Gavin, Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy