Tethering Hawks: United States Restraints in the Cold War

The 2003 American invasion of Iraq broke the U.S.’s historic forbearance from pursuing a policy of preventive war. Recently, considerations of preventive war have come to the fore in the rhetoric of U.S. policymakers and academics. This thesis analyzes the U.S. restraints in historic considerations of preventive war. The period examined is the early Cold War. The cases analyzed are the American considerations of preventive war against the first and second Communist nations to develop nuclear weapons. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by each Communist state prompted the U.S. Departments of State and Defense to independently compile a litany of policy options which debated and weighed the political and military costs of preventive war. The primary source documents used in this thesis were recovered from a variety of sources, including the National Archives, where academically under-examined policy documents were recovered.
The documents examined reveal normative and theoretical restraints in each United States decision not to pursue a policy of preventive war. While the conventional narrative of the Cold War ascribes the phenomenon of peace to the dominant restraint of deterrence, this thesis proposes that each policy of restraint was instead created by several restraints, acting in concert. While current cases regarding considerations of preventive war are not examined, I hope this thesis elucidates how policies of restraint are formed. This thesis does not seek to replace the conventional narrative of deterrence, it seeks to augment it.