100 books like Negotiating the New START Treaty

Love is probably not the term I would use for this book. I am glad that Annie Jacobsen wrote it, and I think anyone interested in the real threat of nuclear war should read it. There are moments in it—particularly one very consequential decision that the U.S. president makes—that are highly implausible and have generated criticism from people who have devoted their careers to nuclear deterrence.

However, it is worth noting that no one actually knows how the leader of a nuclear-armed state would react to the news of an incoming nuclear attack because that scenario has never happened before. I think it is worth emphasizing this book’s subtitle: “A Scenario”—which is not “The Scenario” or “All Scenarios.” There are many scenarios that do not end as definitively as in Jacobsen’s scenario.

I include this book in the topic of reducing the risk of nuclear war because it so vividly… show more.

I love this book because it explains complex matters in straightforward language. What is the purpose of arms control? Why do leaders agree to it? How did agreements come about? Why is reducing nuclear risk so difficult? You can answer those questions using elaborate theories and stultifying language, yet Tom Graham and Damien LaVera frame the texts of agreement with highly readable introductory essays.

Graham served for many years as the General Counsel of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and you can sense his passion for precision. “The START I Treaty, in its detailed complexity, is a lawyer’s dream,” they write in this book. There is so much about that 1991 agreement that blows my mind. START is not even in its name in the actual treaty. We call it START I only because of START II, which US and Russian leaders would later sign but would never enter… show more.

I love this book because it tells the story of individuals working on a complicated and unprecedented problem. In December 1991, an independent Ukraine suddenly became the state with the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world. What should its leaders do? Forever after, political scientists have debated a question in the abstract: “Should Ukraine keep its nukes”?

After Russia’s partial invasion in 2014 and full-out invasion in 2022, the question was, “Should Ukraine have kept its nukes?” And Budjeryn does a fantastic job demonstrating how the reality was far more complicated than that framing. It was a messy path to the 1992 Lisbon Protocol and 1994 Budapest Memorandum, by which Ukraine joined the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 1991 START agreement.

Budjeryn focuses on the human element and an era of uncertainty. I commend this book to anyone who concludes from Russia’s brutality in Ukraine: this is a… show more.

Togzhan Kassenova’s book tells the story of one of the overlooked crimes of the twentieth century: the Soviet Union’s assault on Kazakhstan through careless nuclear testing—this devasted generations of Kazakhs and other non-Russian people. Kassenova also shows the terrifying prospects of what the collapse of the Soviet Union could have entailed.

There were unexploded nuclear devices buried underground and unguarded highly-enriched uranium that very bad people wanted to acquire to build their own bombs. Motivated by its history as a nuclear playground, Kazakhstan contributed to one of the great miracles of our time: the non-proliferation of the massive Soviet nuclear stockpile (some 27,000 warheads at the end of the Cold War) throughout the 1990s. Policymakers rightly worry about states like Iran and North Korea—as they rightly worried about Libya and Iraq in the 1990s and early 2000s.

For the most part, the AQ Khan network—not the Soviet arsenal—made those fears… show more.

This is a shorter book by a well-established historian, who nevertheless writes in an accessible manner for the general reader. It is a good introductory text to the Great Game and contains a good map of the region and several illustrations and photographs.

For readers following coverage of Russia in the American press, this treatment of recent US-Russian relations will be a revelation. Historian Stephen Cohen, while never downplaying the serious shortcomings of Russia under Vladimir Putin, provides a much-needed correction of the widespread idea that the dangerous decline of US-Russian relations is simply the fault of one man. Cohen meticulously chronicles the many American missteps since the end of the Cold War that any Russian leader would have had to consider acts of U.S. aggression. I love this book because it holds a mirror to American views of innocence and benevolence and paints a much more realistic picture of great power conflict than is presented in the news.

The book is a great guide to understand Russia’s perspective on post-Cold War developments and the contemporary crisis of relations with the West. Written by a historian, the book reconstructs the role of NATO expansion in shaping Russia’s security interests since the 1990s. The author documents opportunities, errors, and (mis)perceptions by both sides in setting their relations in the course of growing geopolitical tensions.

Russia has historically connected to Europe as its significant other. This book describes the nature of the country’s identity development through the love-hate relations with European nations and search for recognition by Western other. Sometimes, Russia has sought to borrow Europe’s institutions and values. Other times, it has positioned itself as a great power and a superior system of internal values relative to “corrupt” Europe. 

Russia’s foreign policy has followed different historical trajectories and relations with the outside world. This excellent collection of works by historians and social scientists focuses on the long “shadows of the past” as a lens through which to assess the country’s international behavior and moments of transformation. The explored themes include the impact of Russian foreign policy on domestic political structures, imperial identity, geographic settings, position within the global economy, and others. 

Too often, Russia is seen through Euro-Atlantic eyes and in European terms. But the Russian leadership has long spoken of a shift in global power, the emergence of a “post-West” world—and of the 21st Century being a “Pacific Century.” China has long been at the heart of this view, and an important priority in Russian foreign policy—and this book by a prominent Russian expert traces a Russian view of the emergent Sino-Russian rapprochement. Not everyone will agree with his analysis, but I like thinking about things from different angles, and the intellectual challenge he poses becomes ever more important as sanctions take hold of the Russian economy and as the Sino-Russian partnership becomes one of the central questions of international affairs today.