Roundtable 13-9 on Arms Control for the Third Nuclear Age: Between Disarmament and Armageddon (Review by Nancy Gallagher, University of Maryland)
In Arms the Control for the Third Nuclear Age, David Cooper argues that using arms control to enhance deterrence stability could do more for U.S. national security in a multipolar world of rapid technological change than would either unconstrained competition or global denuclearization. Having worked on these issues at the Department of Defense and top professional military education institutions, Cooper has the knowledge and standing to argue for cooperative constraints on great-power competition using reasoning that could gain support from some of his more hawkish colleagues, a domestic political requirement for sustaining any nuclear risk reduction strategy. Yet, the book makes the prospects for significant, verifiable cooperation bleaker than necessary by conflating two different logics for arms control to stabilize deterrence and reinforcing common misconceptions about arms control with Russia and China.