“Avoiding World War III”: The Existential Origins of Limited War in the Nuclear Age, 1945–2025

Abstract After 1945, the risk associated with nuclear war demanded new ways of thinking about victory and defeat on the modern battlefield. President Eisenhower’s strategy of massive retaliation had the paradoxical effect of increasing the need for limitations on the means employed and the objectives pursued in war to avoid escalation to an existential conflict. Scholarship on the theory of limited war in U.S. history has varied over the last eight decades, but the term remains as poorly understood as it is widely used. The tendency to frame limited war in isolation from the political realities of the early nuclear age has led to revisions of its meaning that associate the concept with strategic failure. This perception is detached from the origins of limited war in modern history and deserves reconsideration in scholarly debates about the means, ends, and scope of wars.