1. See Michael Gerson’s chapter in this volume for a history of the concept. See also David S. Yost, Strategic Stability in the Cold War: Lessons for Continuing Challenges, Paris, France: French In-stitute of International Relations (IFRI) Security Studies Center, Winter 2011.
2. For an analysis of the concept, see Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966, Chap. 6, p. 246. As Schelling described it, “If both sides have weapons that need not go first to avoid their own destruction, so that neither side can gain great advantage in jumping the gun and each is aware that the other cannot, it will be a good deal harder to get a war started. Both sides can afford the rule: When in doubt, wait.”
3. Glenn A. Kent, and David E. Thaler, First-Strike Stability: A Methodology for Evaluating Strategic Forces, R-3765-AF, Santa Mon-ica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1989, p. v.
4. As Schelling put it, “[t]he balance is stable only when nei-ther, in striking first, can destroy the other’s ability to strike back.”
Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1960, p. 232. See also Schelling, Arms and Influence, p. 229.
5. Disturbingly, it has emerged that the Soviets feared a
de-tem to launch a nuclear counterattack in the event of a loss of contact with designated leadership, to ensure that no American attack would go unanswered. David E. Hoffman, The Dead Hand:
The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy.
New York: Doubleday, 2009, pp. 23-24, 60 et seq.
6. See, for instance, Thomas C. Schelling and Morton H. Hal-perin, Strategy and Arms Control, New York: The Twentieth Cen-tury Fund, 1961, esp. Chap. 3.
7. For arguments for a no first use of nuclear weapons policy from the 1980s, see John D. Steinbrunner and Leon V. Sigal, eds., Alliance Security: NATO and the No-First-Use Question, Washing-ton, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1983; Robert S. McNamara,
“The Military Role of Nuclear Weapons: Perceptions and Misper-ceptions,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 62, No. 1, Fall 1983, pp. 59-80; and
“No First Use: A Report by the Union of Concerned Scientists,”
Cambridge, MA, 1983. For the strongest recent argument for a no first use policy for the United States, see Michael S. Gerson, “No First Use: The Next Step for U.S. Nuclear Policy,” International Se-curity, Vol. 35, No. 2, Fall 2010, pp. 7-47.
8. See, for instance, McGeorge Bundy, George F. Kennan, Robert S. McNamara, and Gerard Smith, “Nuclear Weapons and the Atlantic Alliance,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 60, No. 4, Spring 1982, pp. 753-768.
9. This quandary, that too much safety at the nuclear level could make war more “calculable” at the sub-nuclear level, was termed the “stability-instability paradox.” The concept is usually cited to Glenn Snyder, “The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror,” in Paul Seabury, ed., The Balance of Power, San Fran-cisco, CA: Chandler, 1965. Robert Jervis gave it further analysis in Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1984, pp. 31-33.
10. See, for instance, Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesing-er, Annual Defense Department Report for FY1975, Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1974.
11. See Colin Gray and C. Dale Walton’s essay in this volume, as well as Gray’s classic statement in “Nuclear Strategy: The Case
for a Theory of Victory,” International Security, Vol. 4, No. 1, Sum-mer 1979, pp. 58-61, 82-87. For a more recent detailed elabora-tion, see Payne’s The Great American Gamble: Deterrence Theory and Practice From the Cold War to the Twenty-First Century, Fairfax, VA:
National Institute Press, 2008, esp. Chap. 3.
12. See, on one side, Herbert Scoville, “Flexible Madness,”
Foreign Policy, Vol. 14, Spring 1974. For the other side, see Gray,
“Nuclear Strategy,” p. 86; and Payne, The Great American Gamble, Chaps. 8-9, esp. p. 425.
13. A particular point of contention during the Cold War was between those who argued for the essentially cautious decision-making calculus of the Soviet Union as against those who argued that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was inherently aggressive and dedicated to a warfighting nuclear posture. See, for instance, Robert Osgood et al., eds., Containment, Soviet Behav-ior, and Grand Strategy, Berkeley, CA: University of California: In-stitute of International Studies, 1982.
14. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, 1977 Alastair Buchan Memo-rial Lecture, October 28, 1977, available in Survival, Vol. 20, No. 1, January/February 1978, pp. 2-10. See also Henry Kissinger, “The Future of NATO,” in Kenneth A. Myers, ed., NATO—The Next Thirty Years: The Changing Political, Economic, and Military Setting, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980, pp. 3-14.
15. Although the actual strategic balance during these years only approximated these qualities, the objective did receive of-ficial imprimatur from both superpowers in the START Treaty of 1991. See Message of President George H. W. Bush to the Sen-ate, transmitting the START Treaty for the advice and consent of the Senate to ratification, July 31, 1991. Unsurprisingly, given the differences between U.S. and Soviet views as well as within the United States on the nature of “strategic stability,” the term was not defined in the otherwise exhaustive START proceedings. But the Treaty did privilege so-called “stabilizing”—that is, surviv-able—systems and penalized those that were “destabilizing”—
that is, vulnerable and especially those that were both vulner-able and ill-suited for any mission other than holding at risk the strategic forces of the opponent. For a discussion of these issues,
tion Talks and the Quest for Strategic Stability New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 1992. See also the influential Report of the President’s Commission on Strategic Forces, April 1983, p. 3. This latter document helped set the course for the U.S. land-based stra-tegic force and the Ronald Reagan administration’s arms control negotiating positions.
16. For more on this topic, see Elbridge A. Colby, “The United States and Discriminate Nuclear Options in the Cold War,” in Jef-frey A. Larsen and Kerry M. Kartcher, eds., Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, forthcoming.
17. The thorough analysis of the Center for Strategic Budget-ary Assessments provides abundant support for the proposition that the margin of U.S. conventional advantage is narrowing.
See, for instance, Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. et al., Strategy for the Long Haul: The Challenges to U.S. National Security. Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2008; and Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., “The Pentagon’s Wasting Assets: The Eroding Foundations of American Power,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 88, No. 4, July/August 2009, pp. 18-33. As Krepinevich put it in the Foreign Affairs article:
The military foundations of the United States’ global dominance are eroding. . . . The diffusion of advanced military technologies, combined with the rise of new powers, such as China, and hostile states, such as Iran, will make it progressively more expensive in blood and treasure—perhaps prohibitively expensive—for U.S.
forces to carry out their missions in areas of vital interest.
See also Paul K. Davis and Peter A. Wilson, Looming Discontinui-ties in U.S. Military Strategy and Defense Planning: Colliding RMAs Necessitate a New Defense Strategy, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2011.
18. See, for instance, Richard Halloran, “Nuclear Umbrel-la,” Realclearpolitics.com, June 21, 2009, available from www.real-clearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/21/nuclear_umbrella_97104.html;
Richard Halloran, “Doubts Grow in Japan Over U.S. Nuclear Umbrella,” Taipei Times, May 27, 2009, p. 9; and Indira A. R. Laksh-manan, “Iran Might Be Deterred by U.S. Nuclear Umbrella, Gulf
Ally Says,” Bloomberg News, April 9, 2009, available from www.
bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aOSbraDk5bvI.
19. U.S. Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review Report, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, April 2010, pp.
x-xi. While Washington has accepted a relationship of strategic stability with Moscow and Beijing, it has definitively not accepted such a relationship, implying an acceptance of vulnerability, with any other states.
20. U.S. Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review Re-port, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, April 2010, pp. x-xi. While some dispute that the United States finds itself in a situation of mutual vulnerability with China, the Council on For-eign Relations Task Force on U.S. nuclear weapons policy spoke for the majority of observers in “conclud[ing] that mutual vulner-ability with China—like mutual vulnervulner-ability with Russia—is not a policy choice to be embraced or rejected, but rather a fact to be managed with priority on strategic stability.” Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force Report, U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy, William J. Perry and Brent J. Scowcroft, co-chairs, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2009, p. 45.
21. The question of which elements of this concept of strate-gic stability should apply to states with which the United States does not accept a relationship of strategic stability, such as Iran and North Korea, is an important and highly complex issue which is beyond the parameters of this chapter. The fact that this con-ception of stability applies only to the great powers should not, however, be seen as a major defect. Maintaining both deterrence against and peace with the other great powers must be the pri-mary objective of U.S. foreign policy, in light of the persisting pos-sibility of great war, as only these nations can wreak truly cata-clysmic damage on the United States.
22. For a recent defense of a more narrow conception of stra-tegic stability, see James M. Acton’s chapter in this volume as well as his Deterrence During Disarmament: Deep Nuclear Reductions and International Security, London, UK: International Institute of Stra-tegic Studies, 2011, pp. 15-21.
23. Some argue that this is to the benefit of the United States because of current U.S. conventional force advantages. As U.S.
conventional superiority diminishes, however, this argument will lose its appeal. For the classic discussion of the “nuclear revo-lution,” see Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution:
Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-versity Press, 1989.
24. The enormous focus on a nuclear “taboo” could be a spe-cies of this.
25. Nuclear Posture Review Report, p. v.
26. The word “vindicate” has a particular suitability in this context, for it has multiple meanings each of which is an object or method of nuclear deterrence: to punish or avenge; to see free or deliver (as from bondage); to assert one’s interest by means of action; and to defend against encroachment or interference. See
“vindicate,” The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Ed., Ox-ford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 2237.
27. Ambiguity is useful in such contexts because it allows the establishment of principles by which to judge in circumstances that can rarely be precisely anticipated in advance.
28. Nuclear Posture Review Report, p. ix. “Extreme circum-stances” is preferable to “last resort” because the former does not connote that nuclear weapons would only be used after all other options had been exhausted. This temporal requirement could give an opponent the impression that he could climb the ladder of escalation but get off before all other options had been exhausted.
The point is that nuclear weapons would only be used in the grav-est situations. Additionally, any conception of vital intergrav-ests must encompass those of a nation’s established allies in order to meet legitimate U.S. criteria for its extended deterrence obligations as well as broader nonproliferation objectives linked to the mainte-nance of those obligations.
29. See “The Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation, available from carnegieendowment.org/files/2010russia_military_
doctrine.pdf, and specifically: “The Russian Federation reserves the right to utilize nuclear weapons . . . in the event of aggression
against the Russian Federation involving the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is under threat.”
30. For the classic description of this conception of nuclear de-terrence, see Schelling, Arms and Influence, especially pp. 201-204.
31. Lawrence Freedman provided a pithy summation of this point of view: “The essence of the strategy that emerged was that any use or threat of use of nuclear weapons should be seen as a supremely political act, reducing the potential relevance of pure-ly military considerations.” Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983, p. 176. For the classic statement on the impossibility of severing the politi-cal from the military, see Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, eds. and trans., New York: New Every-man’s Library, 1993, pp. 98-100.
32. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, Chap. 8.
33. This was the conception of the eminent nuclear theorist and policymaker Michael Quinlan, who argued that the purpose of nuclear use would be “to defend us not by disarming the foe, as in past times, but by persuading him that he has miscalculated the risk and our resolve.” Tanya Ogilvie-White, On Nuclear De-terrence: The Correspondence of Sir Michael Quinlan, London, UK:
International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011. I am indebted to Walter Slocombe for this reference.
34. Limited nuclear strikes could also be used to affect the conventional balance during a conflict. During the Cold War, U.S.
limited nuclear strikes were planned to delay or retard Soviet and Warsaw Pact aggression against Western Europe. This is a con-ceptually distinct objective the pursuit of which could add to es-calatory pressures. In certain circumstances, however, such risks may be worthwhile or even necessary, as for the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during the Cold War. This question, however, is inherently context-specific.
For more on this point, see Colby, “The United States and Dis-criminate Nuclear Options in the Cold War.”
35. Other but lesser possibilities include launching weapons
ated with the mission of large-scale nuclear attack and launch-ing weapons from delivery systems within or near to a theater of conflict rather than the United States itself. Needless to say, the nature of the target and the scale of destructiveness are orders of magnitude more important than the characteristics of the launch.
36. Whether to inflict harm should be a purely instrumental consideration under this conception. If it were possible to achieve one’s purposes without inflicting damage but simply by making a harmless demonstrative detonation, this would surely be the best course for both moral and prudential reasons. Unfortunately, such a course might not work and, some argue, might actually convey a lack of resolve or even weakness in certain contingen-cies. During the Richard Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger, for instance, dismissed a Joint Chiefs of Staff contingency plan for a nuclear response to a Soviet attack on Iran that called for using three nuclear weapons, remarking that Moscow would think the U.S. President was “chicken” if he used so few weapons. Fred Ka-plan, The Wizards of Armageddon, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983, p. 371. In today’s context, this concern seems grossly over-stated; any use of nuclear weapons would convey a tremendous message.
37. “[If] there is never any incentive to do quickly what might be done slowly, or to jump to conclusions, limited nuclear repri-sals become a good deal less immediately dangerous.” Thomas C. Schelling, “Comment,” in K. Knorr and T. Read, eds., Limited Strategic War, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962, p. 251. The collection as a whole offers a very useful selection of reflections on the nature of limited strategic war by some of nuclear strate-gy’s most eminent analysts, such as Schelling, Herman Kahn, and Klaus Knorr. For a skeptical view of the prospects of controlling escalation, see Desmond Ball, Can Nuclear War Be Controlled? Lon-don, UK: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981.
38. This chapter does not discuss the fraught political impli-cations of this approach. In summary, however, this approach implies the forbearance of absolute victory as an objective, since an opponent would need to find a dignified way out of his pre-dicament. Just as violence would need to be kept limited, so war objectives would also necessarily need to be kept limited. For a similar view, see U.S. Department of Defense, Deterrence Joint Operating Concept, Version 2.0, December 2006, p. 24.
39. For like-minded discussions of the problems of nuclear war termination, see George H. Quester, “War Termination and Nuclear Targeting Strategy,” Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richel-son, eds., Strategic Nuclear Targeting, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1986, pp. 285-306; George H. Quester, “The Difficult Logic of Terminating a Nuclear War” and Leon Sloss and Paolo Stoppa-Liebl, “Objectives and Problems of War Termination,” in Stephen Cimbala, ed., Strategic War Termination, Washington, DC:
Praeger, 1986, pp. 53-74, 99-119; and Leon Sloss, “Flexible Target-ing, Escalation Control, and U.S. Options,” in Stephen J. Cimbala and Joseph D. Douglass, Jr., eds., Ending a Nuclear War: Are the Su-perpowers Prepared? Washington, DC: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1988, pp. 1-9.
40. It is important to note that some degree of fear on the part of an opponent is fully compatible with, if not indeed necessary, under this conception of strategic stability. For deterrence to be effective, an opposing leadership must ultimately fear for its own lives or the existence of whatever else it values. Without such fear, deterrence would be greatly weakened. That said, there is no ad-vantage, under this conception, of making that deterrent threat quick rather than simply sure. Allowing an opponent the time to decide on his course but assuring him that he definitively will suf-fer if he chooses against one’s interests would be the ideal course of action, but of course the factors of certainty and time cannot be so neatly separated in practice.
41. It is also worth noting that, while a multipolar relation-ship would surely complicate strategic stability, there is no logical reason why it should not be capable of being stable. As long as a state’s nuclear forces are sufficiently developed, properly de-ployed and controlled, and adequately numerous, their effective-ness as deterrents should not diminish because it is applied to more than one potential opponent. The United States adequately deters both Russia and China, for instance. For a somewhat ex-treme version of the argument that nuclear multipolarity is not necessarily unstable, see Kenneth W. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, Adelphi Paper 171, London, UK: In-ternational Institute of Strategic Studies, 1981.
42. Hans J. Morgenthau, “Another ‘Great Debate’: The
Na-43. Quoted in Desmond Ball, Politics and Force Levels: The Stra-tegic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1980, p. 12.
44. Unfortunately, in light of fiscal and disarmament pres-sures, the maintenance and modernization of the Triad cannot now be taken for granted. Although President Obama affirmed his commitment to modernizing all three legs of the Triad in con-nection with gaining the Senate’s advice and consent to ratifica-tion of the New Strategic Arms Reducratifica-tion Treaty (New START), there are consistent reports that influential members of the Obama administration and in Congress have pushed for a dyad. For Pres-ident Obama’s commitment to modernizing the Triad, see Mes-sage of President Barack H. Obama to the U.S. Senate on the New START Treaty, February 2, 2011, available from www.whitehouse.
gov/the-press-office/2011/02/02/message-president-new-start-treaty-0.
For suggestions that the administration might consider a dyad of delivery platforms, see “Pursuing the Prague Agenda: An Inter-view with White House Coordinator Gary Samore,” Arms Con-trol Association, April 2011, available from www.armsconCon-trol.org/
print/4898.
45. See, for instance, A.B. Carter et al., eds., Managing Nuclear Operations, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1987, includ-ing the chapter “Continuinclud-ing Control as a Requirement for Deter-ring” by Albert Wohlstetter and Richard Brody, pp. 142-196.
46. For a warning of deficiencies in this field, see Defense
46. For a warning of deficiencies in this field, see Defense