Keir A. Lieber - The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age

We are deeply grateful for the support and assistance we received while writing this book. Our terrific colleagues and students at Dartmouth College, Georgetown University, and the University of Notre Dame were invaluable sources of intellectual inspiration, research assistance, and constructive criticism.

Our universities provided generous grants for travel, research, and writing. In particular, we thank the Center for Security Studies, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Office of Research Services, and the Office of the Provost at Georgetown, as well as the Graduate School Office of Research, Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame.

The financial support of several foundations and other organizations was also crucial for allowing us to complete this work. That included funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Project on Advanced Systems and Concepts for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. An earlier version of chapter 3 (Escaping Stalemate) was published as Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, The New Era of Counterforce: Technological Change and Future of Nuclear Deterrence, International Security 41, no. 4 (Spring 2017): 949; we are grateful to the journal for permission to use the material here.

Over the years, we have presented our work at countless academic workshops and seminars, government offices, educational programs, think tanks, research institutes, military bases, defense universities, and conferencesboth in the United States and abroad. We cannot thank by name every individual who participated in, hosted, or discussed our work at those events, but your comments and criticisms were crucial for the development and clarification of our arguments.

One day-long workshop at the University of Chicago stands out, however, and not just because all such murder boards typically do. As colleagues from several universities gathered to tear apart every chapter of our manuscript, they realized and then slowly convinced us that our book, which we had framed far more narrowly, was actually a critique of the theory of the nuclear revolutionarguably the dominant model for understanding the role of nuclear weapons in international politics. We are deeply grateful to those colleagues for their time, insights, withering critiques, and enormously helpful advice.

Which leads to a related topic: the role of friendship in academic research. It is the friendship of colleagues around the world that led so many of them to read, critique, and try to help us improve our work. And it is the friendship among coauthors that makes the long hours of writing, rewriting, tracking down arcane details and citations, and rewriting yet again not just bearable but worthwhile and fulfilling.

We could not have completed this book, nor balanced our professional and personal lives with any hope of success, without our extraordinary spouses, Meredith Bowers and Jennifer Lind. Occasional eye rolls notwithstanding, their support, patience, and encouragement inspired us every step of the way. We also thank, again, those who supported us from the beginning: Nancy and Robert Lieber, James and Grace Press, and Susan and Joel Bowers.

We dedicate this book to our amazing children: Sophie, Isabel, Lucy, and Delilah Lieber, and Eleanor and Ian Press. Scholars of nuclear deterrence often close such dedications by hoping that their kids might someday live in a world without these horribly destructive weapons. We take a different view. We hope that our children, whom we love more than anything, live in a world in which careful scholarship and smart policies minimize the terror inherent in these weapons while maximizing the prospects for an enduring nuclear peace.