1. See, for example, Colin S. Gray, “Strategic Stability Recon-sidered,” Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 4, Fall 1980, pp. 135-54.
2. See, for example, Colin Powell, prepared statement to the hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate on “Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reduction,” S.
HRG. 107-622, July 9, 2002, available from www.access.gpo.gov/con-gress/senate/senate11sh107.html; Camille Grand, “Ballistic Missile Threats, Missile Defenses, Deterrence, and Strategic Stability,”
International Perspectives on Missile Proliferation and Defenses, Oc-casional Paper 5, Monterey, CA: Monterey Institute for Interna-tional Studies, 2001, pp. 5-11, available from cns.miis.edu/opapers/
op5/op5.pdf; Thérèse Delpeche, “Nuclear Weapons—Less Central, More Dangerous?” in Burkard Schmitt, ed., Nuclear Weapons: A New Great Debate, Challiot Papers 48, Paris, France: Institute for Security Studies, Western European Union, 2001, pp. 14-22, avail-able from www.iss.europa.eu/uploads/media/cp048e.pdf; Thomas Scheber, “Strategic Stability: Time for a Reality Check,” Interna-tional Journal, Vol. 63, No. 4, Autumn 2008, pp. 893-915.
3. Edward L. Warner, remarks on “How is Deterrence and Stability Enhanced/Diminished by Arms Control Beyond New Start?” 2011 United States Strategic Command Deterrence Sym-posium, Omaha, NE, August 3-4, 2011, available from www.
stratcom.mil/video/deterrence/67/Panel_2_-_How_is_deterrence_and_
stability_enhanceddiminished_by_arms_control_bey/.
4. U.S. Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review Report, April 2010, p. 23, available from www.defense.gov/npr/docs/2010%20
nuclear%20posture%20review%20report.pdf. Similarly, in a nod towards the concept of arms race stability, the Nuclear Posture Review Report argues that “a carefully crafted and verifiable [Fis-sile Material Cutoff Treaty] will . . . contribute to nuclear stability worldwide”(p. 13), although it is unclear why “stability” here is qualified by “nuclear” instead of “strategic” as elsewhere.
5. Other statements by U.S. officials also imply a broader meaning. Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller has, for instance, stated that the end of the Cold War:
doesn’t mean we’ve been able to disentangle our nuclear relationship. In fact, that’s something we’re working on very seriously now to try to work with the Russians to have a relationship of assured stability, rather than this mutual deterrence, this standoff of nuclear weapons.
Because although that prevented a shooting war during all the years of the Cold War, nevertheless we feel that nuclear terror is not the kind of environment we want to continue with.
Rose Gottemoeller, interview on ‘Washington Journal,’ C-SPAN, December 23, 2011, available from www.c-span.org/Events/
Washington-Journal-Friday-December-23/10737426583/.
6. Nuclear Posture Review, p. 13.
7. Ibid, p. 6.
8. Sergei Lavrov, Remarks to the State Duma, Moscow, Rus-sia, January 14, 2011, in Russian, available from www.mid.ru/brp_4.
nsf/0/B4B970B7D9B7FAD9C3257818005CDBD2.
9. Ibid.
10. For an insightful analysis of Russian views of strategic stability, see Alexei G. Arbatov, Vladimir Z. Dvorkin, Alexander A. Pikaev and Sergey K. Oznobishchev, Strategic Stability after the Cold War, Moscow, Russia: IMEMO, 2010, pp. 27-9, available from www.nuclearsecurityproject.org/uploads/publications/STRATEGIC-STABILITYAFTERTHECOLDWAR_020211.pdf.
11. The Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation, February 5, 2010, para. 8b (unofficial translation).
12. Lora Saalman, China & the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, Carnegie Paper, Beijing, China: Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, 2011, p. 5, available from carnegieendowment.org/
files/china_posture_review.pdf.
13. Li Bin and Nie Hongyi, “Zhongmei zhanlue wendingx-ing de kaocha” (“A Study of Sino-U.S. Strategic Stability”), Shijie jingji yu zhengzhi (World Economics and Politics), No. 2, 2008, p. 13, quoted in Saalman, China & The U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, p. 5.
14. This specific phrase is regularly employed by Chinese officials. See, for example, Cheng Jingye, Statement to the Third Session of the Preparatory Committee for the 2010 Review Con-ference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, New York, May 4, 2009, p. 3, available from www.chinesemission-vienna.at/eng/fyywj/t562218.htm.
15. See note 2.
16. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1960, ch. 9. For the development of the concept, see Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 3rd Ed., Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 180-184.
17. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence, New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1966, p. 234.
18. In a previous work on deterrence at low numbers, I de-fined arms race stability as the absence of any incentive to aug-ment a nuclear force. While it is clearly important to examine all possible incentives for rearmament in assessing whether deep reductions are desirable, I have come to the conclusion that it is helpful to reserve the term “arms race stability” for a build-up motivated by concern about an opponent’s using nuclear weap-ons first in a crisis. James M. Acton, Deterrence During Disarma-ment: Deep Nuclear Reductions and International Security, Adelphi 417, Abingdon, UK: Routledge for the International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2011, p. 17.
19. Michael S. Gerson, “No First Use: The Next Step for U.S.
Nuclear Policy,” International Security, Vol. 35, No. 2, Fall 2010, pp.
38-39; Acton, Deterrence During Disarmament, p. 38.
20. Equally, crisis stability does not guarantee first-strike sta-bility because a bolt-out-of-the-blue first strike during peacetime could be categorized (depending on the motive) as a first strike instability but not a crisis instability.
21. For a classic example see Glenn A. Kent and David E.
Thaler, First-Strike Stability: A Methodology for Evaluating Strategic Forces, R-3765-AF, Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1989.
22. Scheber, “Strategic Stability,” pp. 895-897; David S. Yost, Strategic Stability in the Cold War: Lessons for Continuing Challenges, Proliferation Papers 36, Paris, France: Ifri, 2011, pp. 16-19, avail-able from www.ifri.org/downloads/pp36yost.pdf.
23. John G. Hines, Ellis M. Mishulovich, and John F. Shull, Soviet Intentions 1965-1985, Vol. I, An Analytical Comparison of U.S.-Soviet Assessments During the Cold War, McLean, VA: BDM Federal, 1995, pp. 27-45, available from www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
nukevault/ebb285/.
24. David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945-1960,” International Secu-rity, Vol. 7, No. 4, Spring 1983, pp. 33-5.
25. Ibid, pp. 50-54.
26. Gerson, “No First Use,” p. 37.
27. Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organization, Accidents and Nuclear Weapons, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 144.
28. Ernest R. May, John D. Steinbruner and Thomas W. Wolfe, History of the Strategic Arms Competition 1945-1972, Part I, Wash-ington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, Historical Of-fice, 1981, p. 475, available from www.dod.gov/pubs/foi/homeland_
defense/missile_defense_agency/226.pdf.
29. Michael S. Gerson, “The Sino-Soviet Border Conflict: De-terrence, Escalation, and the Threat of Nuclear War in 1969,” Al-exandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 2010.
30. David M. Alpern with David C. Martin, “A Soviet War of Nerves,” Newsweek, January 5, 1981, p. 21.
31. Director of Central Intelligence, “Implications of Recent Soviet Military-Political Activities,” Special National Intelligence Estimate 11-10-84/JX, May 18, 1984, para. 2, available from www.
foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0000278546/DOC_0000278546.pdf. See also Peter Vincent Pry, War Scare: Russia and America on the Nuclear Brink, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999, pp. 41-42; David E. Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy, New York: Doubleday, 2000, pp. 94-95.
32. The term “second-best strategic posture” was coined by May, Steinbruner, and Wolfe, History of the Strategic Arms Com-petition 1945-1972, Part I, p. 341. Modern historians with access to the Soviet archives have reached a similar conclusion. See, for instance, Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary, New York:
W. W. Norton and Company, 2006, pp. 243-244.
33. Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, p. 424.
34. May, Steinbruner, and Wolfe, History of the Strategic Arms Competition 1945-1972, Part I, ch. X. The Berlin Crisis may have been a more significant factor in Khrushchev’s decision than May, Steinbruner, and Wolfe recognize. See Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble:” Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy 1958-1964, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997, p. 171.
35. Stephen Prowse and Albert Wohlstetter, “Stability in a World With More Than Two Countries,” in Sanford Lakoff, ed., Beyond START? IGCC Policy Paper 7, La Jolla, CA: University of California at San Diego, Institute on Global Conflict and Coopera-tion, 1988, p. 46, available from igcc.ucsd.edu/assets/001/501173.pdf.
36. Yost, Strategic Stability in the Cold War, pp. 27-28.
37. Scheber, “Strategic Stability,” p. 898.
38. Frank P. Harvey, “The Future of Strategic Stability and Nuclear Deterrence,” International Journal, Vol. 58, No. 2, Spring 2003, p. 327. See also Scheber, “Strategic Stability.”
39. Robert Jervis, “Arms Control, Stability, and Causes of War,” Daedalus, Vol. 120, No. 1, Winter 1991, p. 249.
40. Scheber, “Strategic Stability,” pp. 903-904.
41. For clarity, this section focuses on crisis stability, but the argument applies to longer timescale instabilities too.
42. Of course, some measures might address both problems.
Most obviously, improving political relations would clearly help reduce all incentives for using nuclear weapons first. However, at the level of practical policy—the kind of arms control steps that adversaries might agree to as part of a confidence-building pro-cess—the measures needed to address the different drivers for first use are largely distinct.
43. Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, “The Nukes We Need:
Preserving the American Deterrent,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 88, No.
6, November/December 2009, pp. 39-51.
44. Ibid, p. 50.
45. See, for example, Gray, “Strategic Stability Reconsidered.”
46. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, ch. 8.
47. Jervis, “Arms Control, Stability, and Causes of War,” p. 177.
48. Yost, Strategic Stability in the Cold War, p. 22. One problem with Yost’s analysis is his comparison of U.S. declaratory policy to (what we know about) Soviet war plans. Many analysts who have examined U.S. force posture and what is known about its nuclear war planning have reached the conclusion that, in spite of its declaratory policy, the United States also rejected mutual
vul-Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1984, ch. 3; Scott D. Sagan, Moving Tar-gets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security, Princeton, NJ: Princ-eton University Press, 1989, ch. 1; Austin Long, Deterrence from Cold War to Long War: Lessons from Six Decades of RAND Research, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2008, pp. 25-43, available from www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG636.pdf.
49. Yost, Strategic Stability in the Cold War, p. 23.
50. The most authoritative account of the Soviet build-up is Hines, Mishulovich, and Shull, Soviet Intentions 1965-1985, Vol. I, ch. IV. They argue that much of this build-up was supply driven.
Specifically, the defense-industrial sector “used its political clout to deliver more weapons than the armed services asked for and even to build new weapon systems that the operational military did not want” (p. 61). Unlike the U.S. Cold War assessments on which Yost bases most of his analysis, Soviet Intentions (which Yost does occasionally cite) is based on interviews with senior So-viet officials.
51. See note 34.
52. Yost, Strategic Stability in the Cold War, pp. 19-23. See also note 50.
53. Yost, Strategic Stability in the Cold War, p. 17. The most complete account of the evolution of missile accuracy during the Cold War is Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990. See, in particular, Appendix A. For the impact this trend had on the “lethality” of the U.S. arsenal, see Lynn Eden,
“The U.S. Nuclear Arsenal and Zero: Sizing and Planning for Use—Past, Present and Future” in Catherine McArdle Kelleher and Judith Reppy, eds., Getting to Zero: The Path to Nuclear Disar-mament, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011, pp. 71-73.
54. Yost, Strategic Stability in the Cold War, p. 28.
55. Ibid, p. 9.
56. In fact, crisis stability is only relevant where states have a propensity towards warfighting. If two states reject pre-emp-tion—and can somehow do so credibly—then neither would have to worry about the consequences of the other side’s striking first, thus making the entire issue of crisis stability moot.
57. Yost, Strategic Stability in the Cold War, p. 38.
CHAPTER 5
FUTURE TECHNOLOGY AND STRATEGIC