Deterrence Research Paper

Although the idea of threatening war to prevent war is 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 was first formulated in 1946 by Bernard Brodie, who tried to capture what was revolutionary about the advent of the nuclear era. First, a nuclear warhead was not a weapon, in Brodie’s view, but a terrorist device, whose blast and radiation effects made it inherently indiscriminate. Second, the atomic bomb brought home the fact of mutual vulnerability in a way that aerial bombardment had not. Before the nuclear era, a state’s armed forces had to be defeated before the state and its centers of population could be held hostage or destroyed at will. Once nuclear warheads were mated to missiles in the late 1950s, the state and its populace were defenseless. The balance of terror differed in fundamental respects from the prenuclear balance of power, according to Brodie. ‘The first and most vital step,’ he wrote, ‘for the age of atomic bombs is to take measures to guarantee ourselves in case of attack the means of retaliation. Thus far the chief purpose of a military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.’ These prescient insights became a matter of considerable scholarly discourse. Regrettably they had little influence on nuclear policy.

1. Deterrence In Theory

The logic of deterrence, as Brodie and others recognized, is inherently paradoxical. To deter nuclear attack, it is deemed necessary to threaten nuclear retaliation. Inasmuch as the cost of a nuclear war is prohibitive, neither side would risk it. Yet that rational calculus conveniently overlooks the irrationality of retaliating for a nuclear first strike with a nuclear second strike. Retaliation makes no sense unless the second strike could eliminate the other side’s nuclear forces and prevent it from launching another strike of its own. That deadly logic led Brodie to the paradoxical conclusion that what made deterrence work was the possibility that it might fail, making it prudent for neither side to tempt fate. The same logic led other strategic thinkers to conclude that for deterrence to work, it could not be mere bluff. The threatener had to be willing to carry out the threat. For that to happen, nuclear retaliation had to be automatic or mad. Herman Kahn (1960) captured the sense of that line of reasoning in a phrase, the ‘rationality of irrationality.’ Yet that line of reasoning only posed another paradox: if the deterrer was hotheaded, why would the attacker be prudent?

Even if the threat of retaliation ruled out nuclear war, that seemed to leave the world safe for war waged by other than nuclear means. That was a source of gnawing anxiety for the USA, which was committed by treaty to deter any attack by the USSR on its allies in Western Europe. It did not have the capability to do that by conventional military means alone, at least in the 1950s, so it chose to rely on the threat to initiate nuclear war. That threat was potentially suicidal.

Some strategists insisted that ‘extended deterrence,’ as that threat came to be called, would work if the USA had nuclear superiority. Thomas Schelling (1966) questioned whether superiority assured that the weaker side must yield to the stronger. It was impossible, he insisted, to raise the risk of a nuclear war for the other side without raising it for oneself. He spoke, instead, of a ‘competition in risk-taking.’ Extended deterrence still might work if Soviet leaders could not be sure the USA would shrink from first use of nuclear weapons in the event of war. Schelling (1960) called it ‘the threat that leaves something to chance.’ Such a cosmic bluff prompted a preoccupation with ‘credibility’ and a willingness to run seemingly irrational risks to shore up an incredible threat. McGeorge Bundy (1983) came up with a less demanding alternative, ‘existential deterrence.’ So long as a state possessed nuclear arms, Bundy argued, it had a latent ability to use them, even if it did not explicitly threaten to do so. The mere existence of these arms and the incalculable costs of a nuclear war exerted a cautionary effect on potential foes.

Other strategic thinkers took a more forceful tack. British strategist Basil Liddell Hart (1946) first formulated the idea of graduated deterrence, carefully calibrated to threaten greater costs to an attacker without generating all-out war. Still others debated whether military forces or civilians were the most appropriate targets for nuclear attack. This line of thought culminated in the baroque escalation ladder of Herman Kahn (1960) and the contention of some of his followers that the USA could deter any aggression if it somehow had ‘escalation dominance,’ or military superiority at every level of violence, short of all-out nuclear war. Yet the idea of waging limited nuclear war 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 in theory. What happened in practice was in many ways worse. Deterrence did not govern the production, deployment, or military plans for nuclear arms (Ball 1978). The number of Soviet and US warheads vastly exceeded what was needed for deterrence. The warheads themselves were initially deployed in ways that made them vulnerable to attack. Dispersing them on land and at sea reduced, though did not eliminate their vulnerability, and made command-and-control all the more precarious. Because of the chance that the cosmic bluff could be called, each side drew up detailed war plans to destroy the other. Those war plans fully reflect the deadly logic of deterrence: in the event that war breaks out, nuclear arms confer enormous, some say decisive, advantage on the side that strikes first. The most urgent targets were the other side’s nuclear forces and especially their command-and-control. Concern about a disarming first strike led the USA to keep some of its bombers airborne at all times and to put others on alert, ready to take off at a moment’s notice. It did the same with its missiles. This hair-trigger posture, and the delegation of authority that it necessitated, raised the risk of loss of nuclear control in a crisis. Schelling (1960) called this predicament ‘the reciprocal fear of surprise attack.’ As first one side and then the other began mobilizing forces, the very steps taken to deter a nuclear war might provoke one. Far from exerting a cautionary effect on preparations for war, that fear led both sides to a massive buildup of arms, conventional as well as nuclear, which did little to calm the fear.

That had important implications for theorizing about deterrence. Although some theorists saw mutual deterrence as a source of stability in international politics, others saw it as potentially unstable in the extreme. The first group emphasized the need to demonstrate the capability and will to wage war, lest a potential aggressor doubt a state’s strength or resolve. By this way of thinking, conciliation was dangerous because it might be mistaken for weakness or irresoluteness. A second group of theorists were led to a renewed appreciation of the security dilemma, an idea dating back to Thucydides, who noted that attempts by one side to enhance or demonstrate its military might prove self-defeating. By alarming its rival and leading it to respond in kind, these measures would leave both sides less secure. Such a vicious circle could generate an arms race, or worse, trigger pre–emptive war. These theorists saw the need to couple coercion with conciliation, lest the interaction spiral out of control. To some scholars, the difference between the deterrence and spiral logic depended on each side’s perception of the other’s intentions.

Where perception matters, so does the danger of misperception. The fear that war is imminent is sometimes irrational. Once it takes hold, it is not amenable to a cool calculation of costs. The possibility of pre–emptive war calls into question two major premises of most theorizing about nuclear deterrence, that statesmen will behave rationally in the heat of the moment and that they can control the operations of their armed forces. This led to critiques of deterrence theory on the grounds that it was psychologically naive 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 did its security. Their interdependence was the central feature of game theory. Whether the game of chicken or the prisoner’s dilemma was the appropriate analogy, many scholars who formulated the logic of deterrence drew heavily on game theory for their insights.

One consequence is that deterrence is largely deductive and only weakly grounded empirically. Another reason for its weak evidentiary base is that nuclear history everywhere remains cloaked in secrecy. Without knowledge of the details of nuclear planning and operations, it is difficult to determine how much nuclear strategy is informed by deterrence theory, if at all. A more fundamental reason why the evidence for deterrence is less than compelling is the epistemological difficulty of proving why something did not happen in order to demonstrate that deterrence worked. The obvious counter to the contention that nuclear deterrence kept the USSR out of Western Europe is that it never intended to invade in the first place.

Because the side that is losing could still destroy the side that is winning, safety in the nuclear era lay in cooperation between enemies. That interdependence made nonsense of traditional strategic thought. It also called into question the very idea of strategy as a rational relationship between means and ends. War, in theory, if not always in practice, ‘is controlled by its political object,’ Clausewitz had reasoned. Consequently, ‘the value of this object must determine the sacrifices to be made for it in magnitude and also in duration.’ But what objective could possibly sustain the full measure of sacrifice in a nuclear war? As Lawrence Freedman (1981) concludes, ‘The position we have reached is one where stability depends on something that is more the antithesis of strategy than its apotheosis—on threats that things will get out of hand, that we might act irrationally, that possibly through inadvertence we could set in motion a process that in its development and conclusion would be beyond human control and comprehension.’ Nuclear strategy, understood this way, was a contradiction in terms.

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