Current thinking on arms control and disarmament has been dominated by the analysis of such "objective" factors as the number of weapons, their characteristics, technological developments and nuclear weapons deployment policies. Yet arms control negotiations have had little success so far. In this volume, Daniel Frei asserts that while such objective analysis is indeed indispensable, it needs to be supplemented by a careful, document-based description of Soviet and U.S. perceptions of one another and of the kind of assumptions that have thus far compelled their leaders to seek security in growing numbers of sophisticated weapons at ever-increasing cost.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was left as the world’s sole superpower, which was the dawn of an international order known as unipolarity. The ramifications of imbalanced power extend around the globe—including the country at the center. What has the sudden realization that it stands alone atop the international hierarchy done to the United States? In Psychology of a Superpower, Christopher J. Fettweis examines how unipolarity affects the way U.S. leaders conceive of their role, make strategy, and perceive America’s place in the world. Combining security, strategy, and psychology, Fettweis investigates how the idea of being number one affects the decision making of America’s foreign-policy elite. He examines the role the United States plays in providing global common goods, such as peace and security; the effect of the Cold War’s end on nuclear-weapon strategy and policy; the psychological consequences of unbalanced power; and the grand strategies that have emerged in unipolarity. Drawing on psychology’s insights into the psychological and behavioral consequences of unchecked power, Fettweis brings new insight to political science’s policy-analysis toolkit. He also considers the prospect of the end of unipolarity, offering a challenge to widely held perceptions of American indispensability and asking whether the unipolar moment is worth trying to save. Psychology of a Superpower is a provocative rethinking of the risks and opportunities of the global position of the United States, with significant consequences for U.S. strategy, character, and identity.

Several years ago when this work first appeared, it had become apparent that scientists, who play such a key role in the nuclear enterprise, needed to be alerted to the many questions of conscience and legality that were inextricably interlinked with their work. These questions lay at the heart of the nuclear weapons problem, for whatever the political and military leaders might ordain, the manufacture of such weapons was a plain impossibility without the active assistance of the scientific profession. Yet no substantive work on this topic had until then been attempted. Such a work appeared at that time to be an urgent and important need. If the problem was then acute and serious, it is even more so now. The power of nuclear science has grown and with it has grown the power of the individual scientist to initiate new developments. The changes in the world order that have occurred in the intervening years enable individual scientists to hold themselves out as available for employment. Those who seek their expertise may include not only governments but other entities as well. The power of global destruction that these scientists command renders it imperative that they be alerted on a continuing basis to the problems of conscience that arise. Hence the need for a re-issue of this work, for which there had been many requests from concerned scientists, professional groups, socially concerned organisations and also from lawyers. The book is re-issued in its original form but updated by the inclusion of more recent work as contained in extracts from three judicial opinions upon the matter.

The present volume is an outgrowth of a select symposium convened by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in co-operation with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Stockholm, 15-18 March 1987.