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Elvira Rosert, Atomic anxiety: deterrence, taboo and the non-use of U.S. nuclear weapons. By Frank Sauer, International Affairs, Volume 92, Issue 5, September 2016, Pages 1266–1267, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12715
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By focusing on the non-use of nuclear weapons by the United States, Frank Sauer sets himself a challenging task: to shed new light on a phenomenon (and on a country case) that has been explored already in detail and from different perspectives—which he successfully tackles. His pragmatism-inspired study introduces fear as the emotional basis of nuclear decision-making, and by doing so, makes a theoretical contribution by complementing and provoking existing explanations, as well as an empirical contribution by reinterpreting the political, institutional and personal context of nuclear non-use.
Sauer constructs his argument in five steps which include several deductive and inductive loops. Chapter two offers a concise introduction to the dominant theoretical accounts of nuclear abstinence: the rationalist account with its deterrence models and the constructivist account with its concept of the nuclear taboo. Sauer points readers to the potential of his own account by highlighting the—shared—blind spot of the state of the art: its explanatory research logic conceals the practice of nuclear non-use created by decision-makers as individuals experiencing emotions. To reveal this practice, chapter three designs an epistemological and methodological alternative that the author calls ‘understanding nuclear non-use’, echoing Martin Hollis's and Steve Smith's well-known distinction. In this second analytical step, he criticizes the very effort to conceive of non-events like nuclear non-use causally and proposes instead to ‘div[e] into its meaning for decision-makers’ (p. 52, author's emphasis) by reconstructing it from the actors’ beliefs and practices via the study of language.
