Post-Cold War Conflict Deterrence (1997) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix A: Revising the Practice of Deterrence
Appendix A: Revising the Practice of Deterrence
Pages 64-74
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From page 64... ...
Moreover, within the military establishments that deploy nuclear weapons, the conceptual elaboration of deterrence provides the main guidelines for practical decisions on the size and composition of forces and for the daily management of their operations. The entrenched practice of deterrence has survived the declared ending of the Cold War essentially unaltered a fact that is hardly surprising given the critical organizing functions that the concept has come to perform.
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From page 65... ...
CHANGING CONTEXT There is as yet no agreed formulation or summarizing imagery to characterize the period of history that is to follow the Cold War, but already it should be evident that it will involve a major transformation of international relationships.2 A globally extended economy is forming, driven by a revolution in information technology. The scale of this extended economy will have to undergo an unprecedented expansion as the world population surges over the next five decades.
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From page 66... ...
Unless the globalizing economy successfully extends its reach to those people in the lower economic strata, where the population surge is occurring, the coherence of many if not all political systems is likely to be in question and some would almost certainly be torn apart. It is difficult to imagine a successfully operating international economy of 10 billion people, 6 billion of whom live under conditions of endemic austerity and another 2 billion who experience continuously declining standards of living.
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From page 67... ...
It is worth noticing, however, that none of the countries in question is yet making the extensive investments required to develop classic military power projection capabilities on a global or even a regional scale. In fact the United States is currently the only country sustaining investments of that magnitude, and there are strong reasons why others would not attempt to match what we have done.
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From page 68... ...
This is the minimum deemed necessary to preserve core nuclear deterrence, to protect against an imaginable conventional ground attack in the Far East and tactical air assaults from the West, and also to cope with flaring episodes of civil violence along their southern border. Though these images of potential threat may appear unlikely to the rest of the world, in the traditional logic of military planning they are at least as plausible as the ones the United States currently uses to set standards for its military deployments.
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From page 69... ...
At the outset, at any rate, an international security arrangement based on systematic reassurance would necessarily subordinate but presumably not eliminate the practice of deterrence. The legitimacy of preserving a residual deterrent capability would be accepted, but the primary commitment would be to reassuring measures designed to provide convincing indication that nuclear force operations were being restricted to that single legitimate purpose.
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From page 70... ...
Implicit in the practice is the commitment to respond so quickly that retaliation would be effectively initiated before the initial attack had been completed.5 These alert practices have been accompanied by elaborate physical and procedural measures designed to prevent accidents and unauthorized actions, and they have been fundamentally successful In Mat regard.6 There has been no hostile or unintended explosion of a nuclear weapon since 1945. The record is replete with incidents Mat warn of the inherent danger, however, and there are particularly strong reasons for worrying about crisis conditions.
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From page 71... ...
The Accounting for and Physical Security of Fissionable Materials A supplementary part of the agenda concerns the accounting for and physical security of fissionable matenals.9 In aggregate, the five states that explicitly developed nuclear weapons during the course of We Cold War produced hundreds of metric tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium and fabricated nearly 100,000 nuclear weapons out of this matenal. Very exacting standards of accounting and physical protection were developed for We weapons themselves, but the same standards were not extended to We byproducts of We effort.
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From page 72... ...
It is a by-product of the Cold War practice of deterrence that will surely have to be refined under the imperatives of the new era. In order to establish more robust protection against the unmanageable profusion of clandestine threats, the nuclear weapons establishments will have to set more exacting and more comprehensive standards for the accounting and physical protection of fissionable materials.
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From page 73... ...
The Cold War practice of deterrence was bedeviled by some serious tensions involving the doctrine of force operations. The entire concept of deterrence required, in principle, a strict policy of retaliation; but, as a practical matter, if a nuclear war even appeared muninent, there were powerful incentives to initiate it.
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From page 74... ...
If the normal pattern of force operations is made transparent, then nefarious alternatives that might be secreted away are forced to carry the considerable burden of detachment. If military forces are precluded from training for an operation, there is reasonable assurance that they will not attempt to do it.
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