Deterrence

Leon V Sigal, Social Science Research Council, New York, NY, USA
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Although the idea of threatening war to prevent war is as old as the balance of power, deterrence is not just a new word for
that old idea but a new idea spawned by the nuclear age. Deterrence means threatening with punitive retaliation to prevent
a foe from attacking. It differs fundamentally from defense, which means threatening to fight back if attacked and deny an
attacker its objectives. To deter nuclear attack, it is deemed necessary to threaten nuclear retaliation. The prohibitive cost of
a nuclear war keeps either side from risking it. Yet that rational calculus overlooks the irrationality of retaliating for a nuclear
first strike with a nuclear second strike against a well-armed attacker. Moreover, military plans in practice do not resemble
deterrence in theory. The enormous advantage of striking first has prompted the United States and the Soviet Union, now
Russia, to keep forces on hair-trigger alert, raising fear of loss of nuclear control in a crisis. As a consequence, while some saw
mutual deterrence as a source of stability, others saw it as extremely unstable, leading them to renewed appreciation of the
security dilemma, where attempts to enhance or demonstrate military were self-defeating, and safety lay in cooperation
between enemies.

Deterrence means threatening with punitive retaliation to
prevent a foe from attacking. It differs fundamentally from
defense, which means threatening to fight back if attacked and
deny an attacker its objectives. The heart of the distinction is
whether it would make sense to carry out the threat.
Although the idea of threatening war to prevent war is as old
as the balance of power, deterrence is 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 establish-
ment 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.
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 deter-
rence 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 a 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 the 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,

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 6 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.96001-X 247
248 Deterrence
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 an 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.
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, 1980). The number of the Soviet and the
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 preemptive 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 misper-
ception. 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 preemptive 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.
The questioning seems all the more pertinent with the prolif-
eration of nuclear arms to states like Pakistan and North Korea
or the risk that terrorists could get their hands on a nuclear
weapon. This led to critiques of deterrence theory on the
grounds that it was psychologically naive and operationally
uninformed. Robert Jervis (1976), John Steinbruner (1974),
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 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.

See also: Genealogy in Anthropology; Wars among Nation-
States: Patterns and Causes.
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