Nuclear Inertia: US Weapons Policy After the Cold War (Library of International Relations)

This book examines why despite the Cold War having ended more than ten years ago, the U.S. still maintains an arsenal of over 10,000 nuclear warheads. The major explanatory factors are to be found not in the structure of the international system but in domestic politics. Tom Sauer ascribes the lack of change to bureaucratic resistance, dogmatic thinking and lack of political leadership. Clinton's first Secretary of Defense tried to change US nuclear weapons policy by initiating the 1993-1994 Nuclear Posture Review but was blocked by lower-level bureaucratic opposition. Sauer suggests that this points to a lack of civilian control over the military during the Clinton administration and that parochial interests triumphed at the expense of national and international interests.