Nuclear Deterrence Theory

NUCLEAR DETERRENCE THEORY
• Nuclear deterrence refers to a principle in international relations where the retaliatory

potential and destructive force of nuclear weapons prevents nations from launching a
nuclear attack.
• Principle of deterrence founded on the notion that a nuclear attack by one superpower
would be met with an overwhelming nuclear counterattack such that both the attacker and
the defender would be annihilated.
• Deterrence, military strategy under which one power uses the threat of reprisal effectively
to preclude an attack from an adversary power.
• With the advent of nuclear weapons, the term deterrence largely has been applied to the
basic strategy of the nuclear powers and of the major alliance systems.
• The premise of the strategy is that each nuclear power maintains a high level of instant
and overwhelming destructive capability against any aggression—i.e., the ability, visible
and credible to a would-be attacker, to inflict unacceptable damage upon the attacker with
forces that survive a surprise attack.
Conditions of Nuclear Deterrence
• An essential element in successful deterrence is a degree of uncertainty on the part of a

would-be aggressor as to whether the target power, although attacked and badly
damaged, will nonetheless retaliate—even at the risk of suffering further, crippling
damage in a second attack.
• Thus, nuclear-deterrence strategy relies on two basic conditions: the ability to retaliate
after a surprise attack must be perceived as credible; and the will to retaliate must be
perceived as a possibility, though not necessarily as a certainty.
MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction)
• MAD a strategic situation in which both sides possess the ability to inflict unacceptable
damage upon the opponent at any time during the course of a strategic nuclear exchange,
even after absorbing a surprise first strike.
• Military analyst Donald Brennan argued that attempting to preserve an indefinite
stalemate did little to secure U.S. defense interests in the long term and that the reality of
U.S. and Soviet planning reflected continued efforts by each superpower to gain a clear
nuclear advantage over the other. Brennan personally advocated on behalf of an
antiballistic missile defense system that would neutralize Soviet warheads before they
could detonate.
JUST NUCLEAR DETERRENCE IN CONTEXT OF US (FIVE PRINCIPLES)
Scott D. Sagan states that there are five principles to make nuclear deterrence policy of any state
more just and effective in the future:
 sever the link between the mass killing of innocent civilians and nuclear deterrence
by focusing targeting on adversaries’ military power and senior political leadership,
not their population;
First, all nuclear states should sever the link between deterrence and the mass killing of
civilians. It is striking to observe how so many American strategists, appear to think that only the
threat of massive destruction of cities can deter war. This is strange and even tragic. Dictators
may not care greatly about the lives of their own civilian populations, but they are likely to care
about their military power, their regime's grip on power, and their own personal lives. Such
leaders may be deluded and rash, but they are not suicidal.
This leads us to favor basing deterrence (nuclear if necessary; conventional whenever possible)
on counter-military and counter-leadership targeting—threatening to destroy an adversary's
military power and senior civilian and military leadership—which is both more legal and more
moral than targeting population centers.
 never use or plan to use a nuclear weapon against any target that could be destroyed
or neutralized by conventional weapons;
A second principle of a more just nuclear deterrence policy is to adopt “the nuclear necessity
principle”: the U.S. military should not plan to use nuclear weapons against any target that could
be effectively destroyed with conventional weapons and should use the lowest-yield nuclear
weapon possible against the few deeply buried or hardened targets that could not be destroyed
otherwise. One critic of our proposal privately told me that following this principle would reduce
collateral damage, and that reducing collateral damage would weaken deterrence. But if the
United States uses collateral damage for the sake of deterrence, the damage cannot be considered
collateral, and that use of a nuclear weapon is therefore illegal under international humanitarian
law.
 reject “aggressive reprisal” threats against civilians even in response to enemy

attacks on one's own or allied civilians;
A third principle is to reject targeting of civilian populations under any circumstances, even
in response to an enemy's attack on one's own civilian population.
 replace nuclear “calculated ambiguity” threats against biological or cyberattacks

with “deterrence by denial” strategies;
United States might use nuclear weapons in response to an adversary's use of “non-
nuclear capabilities . . . that could inflict strategic-level damage” on the United States or
its allies. This was widely interpreted to be a reference to a potential cyber- or biological
attack that could kill many American or allied civilians. But the nuclear necessity
principle would suggest that a U.S. response to such an attack should use conventional
weapons to destroy the perpetrators or their capabilities in order to prevent a second
attack, rather than to seek revenge through nuclear retaliation
The best long-term strategy would be to base deterrence of biological weapons and
cyberattacks on deterrence by denial: developing the capability to protect populations and
infrastructure from such threats to such a high degree that no enemy could effectively use
such weapons
 work in good faith toward eventual nuclear disarmament.
The fifth principle is to work in good faith toward the goal of global nuclear
disarmament. First, working in good faith for nuclear disarmament is the law of the land.
Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) requires all
members to work in “good faith” toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. Second, the
active pursuit of nuclear disarmament, even if slower than some would like, helps keep
the nuclear peace by encouraging governments in nonnuclear states to support
nonproliferationThe final reason to support the goal of nuclear disarmament is that even
if nuclear deterrence can be maintained successfully—and there are good reasons to
worry that it cannot—the risk of a nuclear war by accident or through misperception still
exists.
DOES NUCLEAR DETERRENCE WORK?
In addition to the ethical and legal questions surrounding nuclear deterrence, there is also a
growing view that the deterrence theory is fundamentally flawed. Far from guaranteeing our
security, it brings unparalleled risk. In 2010, the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs released
its study Delegitimizing Nuclear Weapons: Examining the validity of nuclear deterrence, which
stated in its introduction ‘We have examined the evidence for nuclear deterrence and found it to
be paltry, if it exists at all’. The study’s key findings on the subject of Deterrence, legitimacy and
value include the following:
• There is clear evidence that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not end the Pacific
War in 1945, rather it was the declaration of war by the Soviet Union on 8th August.
• Contrary to common belief, there is no evidence that nuclear weapons ‘kept the peace’ during
the Cold War.
• Possessing nuclear weapons provides little leverage. Nuclear weapons have failed to give their
possessors decisive military advantage in war.
Perhaps the best voices to tell us how deterrence works (or does not) in practice are those from
the Cold War. Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the USSR, was one who came to realise
that nuclear weapons abolition must be abolished. He wrote in October 2011: Nuclear deterrence
has always been a hard and brittle guarantor of peace…Nuclear deterrence becomes less reliable
and more risky as the number of nuclear-armed states increases…Only a serious program of
universal nuclear disarmament can provide the reassurance and credibility needed to build a
global consensus that nuclear deterrence is a dead doctrine.
Half a century ago, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world frighteningly close to
nuclear catastrophe. Since 1987, the surviving decision-makers on both sides of that crisis have
met annually. Robert McNamara, who was US Secretary of Defense during the crisis, tells us
that there were huge miscalculations on both sides and no-one involved had anticipated the
events that unfolded. McNamara reports, ‘We were a hair’s breadth from absolute disaster’. In
McNamara’s film The Fog of War he says, ‘Any military commander must admit when he looks
back, if he is honest, that he has made mistakes…I have, we all have…But with nuclear weapons
there is no place for mistakes. There is no learning time with nuclear weapons’.

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NUCLEAR DETERRENCE THEORY

• Nuclear deterrence refers to a principle in international relations where the retaliatory

Conditions of Nuclear Deterrence

• An essential element in successful deterrence is a degree of uncertainty on the part of a

MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction)

JUST NUCLEAR DETERRENCE IN CONTEXT OF US (FIVE PRINCIPLES)

 reject “aggressive reprisal” threats against civilians even in response to enemy

 replace nuclear “calculated ambiguity” threats against biological or cyberattacks

DOES NUCLEAR DETERRENCE WORK?

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