Some writers are now beginning to contribute to the emergence of a new paradigm in international security that is radically different from our existing worldview. In conventional thinking, the United States is clearly the sole superpower and is unlikely to face threats that are remotely comparable to the Soviet threat of the postwar years. President Bill Clinton’s first CIA director, James Woolsey, said that the United States had slain the dragon but now lived in a “jungle” full of poisonous snakes. That jungle might possibly include a reinvigorated Russia; China could eventually become a threat; there are problems in geostrategic zones such as the Persian Gulf and Northeast Asia; and there are individual difficulties involving failed states or insurrections that might affect U.S. interests and therefore require appropriate intervention. Even so, all of this can be handled with appropriate military capabilities, but liberal market democracy is the order of the day and no great problems loom over the horizon.

The new paradigm, just beginning to emerge and still on the margins of international relations and strategic studies, presents a very different view. Three potential “drivers” of international insecurity are envisaged. The first and perhaps most fundamental is that liberal market globalization is lamentably failing to deliver economic justice. There is a clear and widening gap between about one billion people who are doing very well and the remaining five billion, many of whom remain destitute and most of whom are marginalized from the elite world of the North Atlantic and Western Pacific.

This increasingly divided world is also facing, for the first time in history, environmental constraints on global human development. The early warning sign was the depletion of the ozone layer by CFC and other pollutants, but climate change is already seen as a far more serious problem. If predictions of major changes in tropical rainfall distribution are accurate, this could be one of the dominant international security issues of the first half of the new century, especially as decreases in the ecological carrying capacity of some of the world’s richest croplands lead to impoverishment and mass migration. Finally, a divided and environmentally constrained world has the Cold War legacy of weapons of mass destruction, making it potentially possible, in Roger Barnett’s perceptive phrase, for “the weak to take up arms against the strong.”

The literature on these issues, in both journals and books, remains weak, and the task of developing an appropriate security paradigm for the twenty-first century has barely begun. Yet two new books, one on nuclear issues and the other on globalization and inequality, make valuable contributions. While they initially appear to be on widely different themes, there is much more of a common thread.

A multitude of books on nuclear issues emerged from the Cold War era, and, compared with this, the 1990s was a veritable desert. By the end of the decade, it was apparent that the nuclear age was far from over; rather it was in a state of transition. While the top-heavy arsenals of the Cold War had been substantially curbed, all the major nuclear powers remained committed to a nuclear future, an attitude bolstered by the nuclear testing in Pakistan and India.

China is slowly modernizing its nuclear forces while remaining ready to boost them substantially if U.S. national missile defense goes ahead, and Britain and France are completing expensive modernizations of their sea-based forces. Israel’s nuclear forces remain a hidden feature of the Middle East standoff, never discussed in polite circles but always in the background. Russia, with its collapsing conventional forces, is more dependent on its nuclear forces to preserve some semblance of military power.

Developments in the United States are especially pertinent. The failure to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is seen by many nonnuclear states as proof that the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s requirements for further nuclear disarmament will be ignored. As if to confirm this, a new tactical bomb, the B61-11 earth-penetrating warhead, has already been deployed and new warhead designs are being developed.

In short, the nuclear genie is very much with us, and Alternative Nuclear Futures is a rare and thoroughly welcome attempt to examine the nuclear possibilities of the coming decades. John Baylis and Robert O’Neill have brought together a highly competent collection of authors to produce a book that presents a wide range of arguments to good effect.

Lee Butler, Lawrence Freedman, Colin Gray, Robert S. McNamara, Harald Muller, George H. Questor, and Michael Quinlin are among the impressive range of contributors. The editors also are notably effective at looking at regional developments, including a contribution from Efraim Karsh on the Middle East and Ramesh Thakur on South Asia. There is also a reasonably clear-cut division of views between those, such as Butler, who advocate serious moves toward nuclear abolition and others who see no alternative to a nuclear future, however different from the past.

Of the abolitionists, the most impressive contribution is by Michael McGwire, with a concentrated set of arguments that is not easy to rebut. In some ways, the most interesting chapter is by one of the editors, Robert O’Neill. His “Weapons of the Underdog” systematically explores the idea that nuclear weapons will be far more politically valuable to weaker states and possibly substate actors—a great future for deterrence, but not quite what you might expect.

If there is one weakness to this otherwise excellent book, it is the limited consideration given to the connection between nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Some authors, including Karsh in the Middle East context, begin to explore it, but this is an aspect of nuclear futures that is being given substantial prominence by military advocates of nuclear rearmament, especially in the United States.

While chemical weapons may present a relatively minor problem—especially now that the Chemical Weapons Convention is making some headway—the issue of biological weapons is considered far more serious, especially following the remarkable achievements of the Iraqi biological weapons program in the late 1980s. Many advocates of modernized nuclear forces now point to the requirement to have a potential nuclear response to biological weapons, especially when developed and deployed by “underdog” states.

For the abolitionists this is not an easy argument to refute, even if the claims for biological warfare capabilities are so often exaggerated. At the very least, it points to the extreme importance of negotiating a greatly strengthened Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention (BTWC). The 1972 BTWC may be fine in theory but remains intensely weak in practice. Some of the debaters in Alternative Nuclear Futures are strong in their advocacy of a nuclear-free world, but this will be even more difficult to achieve if we do not also successfully address the control of biological weapons.

The second book, Inequality, Globalization and World Politics, is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on globalization. It addresses an issue that is central to international political futures, yet generally ignored in most of the ethnocentric writing on the subject. Editors Andrew Hurrell and Ngaire Woods begin with the fact that globalization appears to be increasing the gap between rich and poor, both within and among states, and also is increasing the divisions of political power. Thus the marginalized majority have decreasing power within most states, and, globally, weak states themselves are being excluded from the corridors of global power, where rules of economic, social, and environmental behavior are being made.

The editors examine these issues in their own contributions and through a series of chapters covering a wide range of themes. The book addresses such issues as sovereignty, justice, gender, and environmental aspects of inequality. There also is a particularly good contribution from Frances Stewart and Albert Berry on liberalization and inequality, supported by impressive empirical data.

Inequality, Globalization and World Politics is a deeply critical analysis of the “underside” of globalization and a powerful antidote to the plethora of books that concentrate so avidly on the brave new globalized world of the early twenty-first century, a world seen almost exclusively from the viewpoints of the elite. The book goes beyond critical analysis to suggest areas of positive action. This is particularly welcome in Robert Deacon’s contribution on “Social Policy in a Global Context,” with its wide-ranging set of proposals for reform of those Bretton Woods and U.N. agencies that still exert some measure of control over globalization.

Each of these books breaks new ground and each says much, either directly or indirectly, about the evolving problems of international insecurity. Alternative Nuclear Futures has its particular value in providing a range of thoughtful contributions on a neglected area of security studies, but the book is also intimately concerned with security issues.

If, as seems probable, the processes of globalization result in a polarized world community with a deeply embittered and marginalized majority, then the real fracture lines in the coming decade will be between this majority and an entrenched elite increasingly concerned with protecting its own precious security. But the majority world is more literate and educated than three or four decades ago; it is more “wired” to the global system and consequently much more aware of its own marginalization. A revolution of unfulfilled expectations is hardly a recipe for a peaceful world.

If an age of insurgencies is more likely than a clash of civilizations, it is equally to be avoided. By focusing on inequality and globalization, Hurrell, Woods, and their coauthors provide us with an initial and valuable analysis of issues that will take center stage as we are forced to rethink our obsolete security paradigm left over from the Cold War years.