A Plea for Restraint

This essay reconstructs Hedley Bull’s position on nuclear proliferation in The Anarchical Society. Avoiding the extremes of nuclear optimism and pessimism, Bull provided nuanced arguments about the relationship between nuclear proliferation and international order. Bull remained agnostic as to what the world of many nuclear powers would look like. He used this unpredictability to emphasize the notion of restraint involving both superpower cooperation to prevent states from going nuclear as well as the exercise of self-restraint on the part of superpowers. Showing restraint was crucial to the continued existence of the states system. Bull worried that proliferation represented a particular threat to it. Nuclear weapons exposed states to the prospect of sudden and complete destruction. This could lead to the abolition of the state system and its replacement with world government, to which Bull was strongly opposed. The conclusion illustrates Bull’s relevance in relation to the recent pursuit of non-proliferation.