Commentary on Emanuel Adler, The Emergence of Cooperation: National Epistemic Communities and the International Evolution of the Idea of Nuclear Arms Control , International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 1, (Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination), Winter, 1992, pp. 101-145).

The author’s main thesis is that the US arms control epistemic community, made up of scientists, strategists and academics of the late 1950s and early 1960s, became aware of the vulnerability of US nuclear weapons and concerned about the reciprocal fear of surprise attack, and predicted that both US national security and avoidance of a nuclear war would be enhanced by persuading the superpowers to collaborate in stabilizing the nuclear balance though arms control. Just as importantly, this epistemic community was then able to reach into places where decisions were made and influence the minds of the people who made them, and even, in time, joined their ranks, thereby turning their ideas into widespread national security policy and practice. Their understanding of the nature and uses of such a prudential association arms control international regime was eventually diffused and accepted by the Soviet Union and became the foundation of US-Soviet cooperation not only over the 30 years from 1960 to 1990, but even beyond the end of the Cold War.

President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, January 17, 1961 (Part 1)

The innovation process of this group was fueled, according to Adler, by their realization that nuclear deterrence had become unstable and that a catastrophe could occur against the wishes of adversary states, as well as by a number of events such as Soviet ICBM testing in 1957, the launch of Sputnik in the same year, and the Gaither Committee Report proposing an across-the-board military buildup which alarmed Eisenhower and made him more receptive to arms control ideas.

So, if we accept that the selection process of such arms control ideas which best fit the interests of policy makers and passed the test of public opinion started not only under the Kennedy/Johnson Administration, but was already evident under Eisenhower, then “by the time Kennedy entered office significant trends were under way” (Adler 1992, at 125): a framework of negotiations and a policy on which to build; emerging arms control concepts as legitimate foci of policy debate; government personnel and organizational structures with a vested interest in arms control. Thus, the pioneering work accomplished under the Eisenhower administration played a critical (although not sufficient!) role in the adoption of stable deterrence and arms control notions by the Kennedy / Johnson administration.

This transition from disarmament to arms control, eventually accepted by both US and Soviet policy makers and at the basis of their relationship from 1968 onwards, once the USSR achieved party with the US in terms of nuclear missiles, meant that bureaucracies in both countries “had to go through a process of adjustment and conceptual evolution” (Adler 1992, p. 128). Stable deterrence and arms control eventually became a salient paradigm of national security in both the US and USSR and gave rise to arms control agendas and political coalitions capable to carry them out (Adler 1992, p. 133).

The end result was the creation of an international regime of arms control between two powers with widely divergent goals and values, but at the same time with shared interests in these specific areas – in other words, a “prudential association” regime. “Thus, once arms control ideas became embodied in domestic and international procedures and institutions, the domestic and international games were irrevocably changed. Each new generation of leaders had to make its (rational) decisions on the basis of an inherited intellectual code of international arms control ideas which, with the passage of time, was enlarged, refined, and taken for granted… And since the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, arms control has also become a means for enabling the transition to a new European order” (Adler 1992, p. 140).

President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, January 17, 1961 (Part 1)

If Adler’s analysis is correct, as I think it is, then Eisenhower’s “new thinking” regarding nuclear weapons as well as his foreign policy becomes even more complex than already assumed. The immediate, short-term image he projected was that of a Republican Cold-Warrior President who was determined to use the US nuclear arsenal not only for deterrence, but also compellence purposes (Korea in 1953, Quemoy and Matsu Islands in 1954 and 1958); in the medium-term, his “New Look” policy purporting to see nuclear weapons as the first line of defense in any war was designed to actually avoid the possibility of any war; in the long-term, his openness to the ideas of the strategic arms control epistemic community shows in a new light his “Open Skies” proposal, his “Atoms for Peace” proposal and even his U-2 surveillance program as they acquire an entirely new meaning and no longer leave the beginning of the Test Ban Treaty Negotiations in 1957 as an isolated moment in his administration.

In effect, at the time Eisenhower took power, the rules of the game for the use of nuclear weapons had not been established, and there was, as Crockatt states, a virtual absence of a negotiating culture” between the US and USSR (Crockatt 1995, at 153). Eisenhower carefully combined the rhetoric of compellence for internal political purposes, with that of a “New Look” policy for both internal budgetary reasons and external deterrence of any wars, whilst beneath these two layers, playing a critical role in encouraging the development and establishment of an entirely new set of rules based on the ideas of the strategic arms control epistemic community which were to establish the fundamental parameters of a prudential association international arms control regime that was to become the corner-stone of US-Soviet relations for the next thirty years and the best guarantor of the “Long Peace” of the second half of the 20th Century between the two rival superpowers. Eisenhower wasn’t playing poker, nor even bridge, but rather three-dimensional chess…