Abstract

This dissertation combines intellectual and diplomatic history in order to show how formal American realists dealt with the emergence of thermonuclear weapons systems in the 1950s and early 1960s. In particular, it examines how these American intellectuals and policy-makers reconciled their basic realist conviction that great war is always better than national defeat with the prospect of a thermonuclear war that would apparently destroy humanity. ;I drew upon a wide range of sources for this dissertation. To write the intellectual history I looked at scholarly and popular journals, books, and private letters and unpublished essays. The diplomatic history stemmed largely from the State Department's Foreign Relations of the United States series, several pertinent volumes of which were released just as I began writing. Also I used other archival sources, notably the Declassified Document Collection. The broad scope of this work encouraged me to use many secondary sources; this dissertation was significantly informed by the work of many historians and political scientists. ;The general conclusion of this dissertation is simple: the prospect of a thermonuclear war forced prominent American realists to abandon their core belief that the United States must wage a great war rather than put at risk its political survival. Realist intellectuals like Reinhold Niebuhr, George Kennan, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Morgenthau reached such a conclusion in the 1950s and early 1960s. Policy-makers like Dwight D. Eisenhower and Robert S. McNamara quietly arrived at the same conclusion during the Berlin crises of 1958-59 and 1961. ;The unique consequence of a thermonuclear war--the possible extermination of humanity--pushed American realists beyond a traditional state-centered realism. Their belief that the realist must seek to avert the death of his collective forced them to reject an American national security policy based upon the genuine threat of total nuclear war