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Deterrence
Deterrence means threatening punitive retaliationto prevent a foe from attacking. It differs fundament-ally from defense, which means threatening to fightback if attacked and deny an attacker its objectives.The heart of the distinction is whether it would makesense to carry out the threat.Althoughtheideaofthreateningwartopreventwaris as old as the balance of power, deterrence was not just a new word for that old idea. The idea of deterrence originated with the atomic bomb. It wasfirst formulated in 1946 by Bernard Brodie, who triedtocapture whatwas revolutionaryabouttheadventof the nuclear era. First, a nuclear warhead was not aweapon, in Brodie’s view, but a terrorist device, whoseblast and radiation effects made it inherently indis-criminate.Second,theatomicbombbroughthomethefact of mutual vulnerability in a way that aerialbombardment had not. Before the nuclear era, astate’sarmed forces hadtobedefeatedbefore thestateand its centers of population could be held hostage ordestroyed at will. Once nuclear warheads were matedto missiles in the late 1950s, the state and its populacewere defenseless. The balance of terror differed infundamental respects from the prenuclear balance of power, according to Brodie. ‘The first and most vitalstep,’ he wrote, ‘for the age of atomic bombs is to takemeasures to guarantee ourselves in case of attack themeans of retaliation. Thus far the chief purpose of amilitary establishment has been to win wars. Fromnow on its chief purpose must be to avert them.’ Theseprescient insights became a matter of considerablescholarly discourse. Regrettably they had little in-fluence on nuclear policy.
1. Deterrence in Theory
The logic of deterrence, as Brodie and othersrecognized,isinherentlyparadoxical.Todeternuclearattack, it is deemed necessary to threaten nuclearretaliation. Inasmuch as the cost of a nuclear war isprohibitive,neithersidewouldriskit.Yetthatrationalcalculus conveniently overlooks the irrationality of retaliating for a nuclear first strike with a nuclearsecond strike. Retaliation makes no sense unless thesecond strike could eliminate the other side’s nuclearforces and prevent it from launching another strike of its own. That deadly logic led Brodie to the para-doxical conclusion that what made deterrence workwas the possibility that it might fail, making it prudentfor neither side to tempt fate. The same logic led otherstrategic thinkers to conclude that for deterrence towork,it couldnot bemere bluff. The threatenerhad tobe willing to carry out the threat. For that to happen,nuclear retaliation had to be automatic or mad.Herman Kahn (1960) captured thesense of that line of reasoning in a phrase, the ‘rationality of irrationality.’Yetthatlineofreasoningonlyposedanotherparadox:if the deterrer was hotheaded, why would the attackerbe prudent?Even if the threat of retaliation ruled out nuclearwar,thatseemed toleave theworld safe forwar wagedby other than nuclear means. That was a source of gnawing anxiety for the USA, which was committedby treaty to deter any attack by the USSR on its alliesinWesternEurope.Itdidnothavethecapabilitytodothat by conventional military means alone, at least inthe 1950s, so it chose to rely on the threat to initiatenuclear war. That threat was potentially suicidal.Some strategists insisted that ‘extended deterrence,’as that threat came to be called, would work if theUSAhadnuclearsuperiority.ThomasSchelling(1966)questioned whether superiority assured that theweaker side must yield to the stronger. It was impos-sible, he insisted, to raise the risk of a nuclear war forthe other side without raising it for oneself. He spoke,instead, of a ‘competition in risk-taking.’ Extendeddeterrence still might work if Soviet leaders could notbesure the USA would shrink from first use of nuclearweapons in the event of war. Schelling (1960) called it‘the threat that leaves something to chance.’ Such acosmic bluff prompted a preoccupation with ‘credi-bility’ and a willingness to run seemingly irrationalrisks to shore up an incredible threat. McGeorgeBundy (1983) came up with a less demanding alter-native,‘existential deterrence.’ So long as a statepossessed nuclear arms, Bundy argued, it had a latentability to use them,even if it did not explicitly threatento do so. The mere existence of these arms and theincalculablecostsofanuclearwarexertedacautionaryeffect on potential foes.Other strategic thinkers took a more forceful tack.British strategist Basil Liddell Hart (1946) first formu-lated the idea of graduated deterrence, carefullycalibrated to threaten greater costs to an attackerwithout generating all-out war. Still others debatedwhether military forces or civilians were the mostappropriate targets for nuclear attack. This line of thought culminated in the baroque escalation ladderofHermanKahn(1960)and thecontention ofsome of his followers that the USA could deter any aggressionif it somehow had ‘escalation dominance,’ or militarysuperiority at every level of violence, short of all-outnuclear war. Yet the idea of waging limited nuclearwar and controlling escalation raised the question of how a nuclear war could stop, short of a dead end.
2. Deterrence in Practice
Deterrence, in short, did not work very well intheory. What happened in practice was in many waysworse. Deterrence did not govern the production,deployment, or military plans for nuclear arms (Ball3542
Deterrence
 
1978). The number of Soviet and US warheads vastlyexceeded what was needed for deterrence. The war-heads themselves were initially deployed in ways thatmade them vulnerable to attack. Dispersing them onlandandatseareduced,thoughdidnoteliminatetheirvulnerability, and made command-and-control all themoreprecarious.Becauseofthechancethatthecosmicbluff could be called, each side drew up detailed warplanstodestroytheother.Thosewarplansfullyreflectthe deadly logic of deterrence: in the event that warbreaks out, nuclear arms confer enormous, some saydecisive, advantage on the side that strikes first. Themosturgenttargetsweretheotherside’snuclearforcesand especially their command-and-control. Concernabout a disarming first strike led the USA to keepsome of its bombers airborne at all times and to putothers on alert, ready to take off at a moment’s notice.It did the same with its missiles. This hair-triggerposture, and the delegation of authority that itnecessitated, raised the risk of loss of nuclear controlinacrisis.Schelling (1960)calledthis predicament ‘thereciprocal fear ofsurpriseattack.’ As firstoneside andthen the other began mobilizing forces, the very stepstaken to deter a nuclear war might provoke one. Farfrom exerting a cautionary effect on preparations forwar, that fear led both sides to a massive buildup of arms, conventional as well as nuclear, which did littleto calm the fear.That had important implications for theorizingaboutdeterrence.Althoughsometheoristssawmutualdeterrence as a source of stability in internationalpolitics, others saw it as potentially unstable in theextreme. The first group emphasized the need todemonstrate the capability and will to wage war, lest apotential aggressor doubt a state’s strength or resolve.By this way of thinking, conciliation was dangerousbecause it might be mistaken for weakness or irreso-luteness. A second group of theorists were led to arenewed appreciation of the security dilemma, an ideadating back to Thucydides, who noted that attemptsby one side to enhance or demonstrate its militarymight prove self-defeating. By alarming its rival andleading it to respond in kind, these measures wouldleave both sides less secure. Such a vicious circle couldgenerate an arms race, or worse, trigger pre–emptivewar. These theorists saw the need to couple coercionwith conciliation, lest the interaction spiral out of control. To some scholars, the difference between thedeterrence and spiral logic depended on each side’sperception of the other’s intentions.Where perception matters, so does the danger of misperception. The fear that war is imminent issometimes irrational. Once it takes hold, it is notamenabletoacoolcalculationofcosts.Thepossibilityof pre–emptive war calls into question two majorpremises of most theorizing about nuclear deterrence,that statesmen will behave rationally in the heat of themoment and that they can control the operations of their armed forces. This led to critiques of deterrencetheory on the grounds that it was psychologicallynaive and operationally uninformed. Robert Jervis(1974), John Steinbruner (1976), and Scott Sagan(1993) are leading exemplars of these approaches.One side’s strategy depended on the other’s. So didits security. Their interdependence was the centralfeature of 
game theory
. Whether the game of chickenor the prisoner’s dilemma was the appropriate ana-logy, many scholars who formulated the logic of deterrence drew heavily on game theory for theirinsights.One consequence is that deterrence is largely de-ductive and only weakly grounded empirically. An-other reason for its weak evidentiary base is thatnuclearhistoryeverywhereremainscloakedinsecrecy.Without knowledge of the details of nuclear planningand operations, it is difficult to determine howmuch nuclear strategy is informed by deterrence the-ory, if at all. A more fundamental reason why theevidence for deterrence is less than compelling is theepistemological difficulty of proving why somethingdidnothappeninordertodemonstratethatdeterrenceworked. The obvious counter to the contention thatnuclear deterrence kept the USSR out of WesternEurope is that it never intended to invade in the firstplace.Because the side that is losing could still destroy theside that is winning, safety in the nuclear era lay incooperation between enemies. That interdependencemade nonsense of traditional strategic thought. It alsocalled into question the very idea of strategy as arationalrelationshipbetweenmeansandends.War, intheory, if not always in practice, ‘is controlled by itspolitical object,’ Clausewitz had reasoned. Conse-quently, ‘the value of this object must determine thesacrifices to be made for it in magnitude and also induration.’ But what objective could possibly sustainthe full measure of sacrifice in a nuclear war? AsLawrence Freedman (1981) concludes, ‘The positionwe have reached is one where stability depends onsomething that is more the antithesis of strategy thanits apotheosis—on threats that things will get out of hand, that we might act irrationally, that possiblythrough inadvertence we could set in motion a processthat in its development and conclusion would bebeyond human control and comprehension.’ Nuclearstrategy, understood this way, was a contradiction interms.
See also
: Diplomacy; Genealogy in Anthropology;War: Causes and Patterns
Bibliography
Ball D 1980
Politics and Force Le
els
. University of CaliforniaPress, Berkeley, CABrodie B 1946
The Absolute Weapon
. Harcourt, Brace, NewYork
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