Nuclear Deterrence Quotes

Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?

They could take the money from building enough nukes to kill all the Russians in the world and give it to libraries. What good does an independent nuclear deterrent do Britain, compared to the good of libraries?

Every martial art, from T’ai Chi Chuan to the nuclear deterrent, is based on a doctrine—an idea of how combat works.

What deters is not the capabilities and intentions we have, but the capabilities and intentions the enemy thinks we have. The central objective of a deterrent weapons system is, thus, psychological. The mission is persuasion.

Unique among security strategies (at least until now), nuclear deterrence rests on a series of untestable abstractions:

As the international relations scholar Hedley Bull noted, “mutual nuclear deterrence … does not make nuclear war impossible, but simply renders it irrational,” but then added that a rational strategist is one “who on further acquaintance reveals himself as a university professor of unusual intellectual subtlety.”86

The driver of deterrence success is not nuclear weapons, it is nuclear posture. Nuclear weapons may deter, but they deter unequally.

Paranoia is a psychological phenomenon, same as deterrence.

In a 2015 TED Talk, Bill Gates asserted, “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes. Now, part of the reason for this is that we’ve invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents. But we’ve actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We’re not ready for the next epidemic.

In the past decade, the distance between those who see nuclear disarmament as the best policy for global peace and stability and those who see nuclear deterrence as the cornerstone of the world order has increased. The division is often stark and binary, with little middle ground, save for the world's greatest nuclear power, the United States, who confusingly appears to pursue both, mutually exclusive policies simultaneously.

The theatrical device represented by the president’s moment-by-moment day-and-night access to the “football,” with its supposedly unique authorization codes, has always been exactly that: theater—essentially a hoax. Whatever the public declarations to the contrary, there has to be delegation of authority and capability to launch retaliatory strikes, not only to officials outside the Oval Office but outside Washington too, or there would be no real basis for nuclear deterrence.

As nuclear weapons spread into more and more hands, the calculus of deterrence grows increasingly ephemeral and deterrence less and less reliable. In a widely proliferated world, it becomes ever more difficult to decide who is deterring whom and by what calculations.

Perimeter greatly reduced the pressure to launch on warning at the first sign of an American attack. It gave Soviet leaders more time to investigate the possibility of a false alarm, confident that a real attack would trigger a computer-controlled, devastating response. But it rendered American plans for limited war meaningless; the Soviet computers weren’t programmed to allow pauses for negotiation. And the deterrent value of Perimeter was wasted. Like the doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove, the system was kept secret from the United States.

We think deterrence works. The problem is that, notwithstanding the confident claims of countless theorists, including those reviewed here, we do not really know why nuclear bombs have not been dropped since 1945, or at the very least, we cannot prove our theories and instincts. Was it good statesmanship? Was Kenneth Waltz right, and nuclear weapons really are the great stabilizers? Or perhaps it was just luck? As is often said about the inadvisability of testing nuclear deterrence failures, we have never run the experiment, and we hope we never will.

It was typical of U.S. strategists, then and later, to leave European, North African, and Asian casualties entirely out of account in weighing the deterrent balance. And I don’t know of any instance of a president or any civilian official raising this point. In retrospect, that’s a startling commentary.

The logic of nuclear deterrence gets more and more convoluted the deeper one goes into it. It is assumed, for instance, that the leaders of Russia, in contemplating an attack on the UK, would be sufficiently sane and rational as to weigh up the consequences of a possible retaliatory nuclear strike from the UK and decide on that basis to refrain from attacking. On the other hand, it is assumed that those same leaders would base their sane and rational decision on the likelihood of their counterparts in the UK acting so insanely and irrationally as to be willing to launch nuclear weapons against Russia that would almost certainly bring about their own total self-destruction.

The implication—never questioned by anyone at RAND while I was there—was that adequate deterrence for the United States demanded a survivable, assured second-strike capability to kill more than the twenty million Soviet citizens who had died in World War II. That meant we were working to assure the survival under attack of a capability for retaliatory genocide, though none of us ever thought of it in those terms for a moment.

Nuclear deterrence will remain a vital aspect of security. or Nuclear deterrence will have a smaller role in future security. Sources are split in their assessment of the importance of nuclear weapons and the validity of traditional nuclear deterrence in the 2001 - 2015 period. On the one hand are those who see nuclear weapons as decreasingly effective tools in deterring war. On the other are those experts who concede that nuclear weapons may have a different role than at the height of the Cold War, but who argue that they remain the ultimate deterrent, with considerable effect on the actions of even rogue states. Many experts who state a moral opposition to nuclear weapons have translated this into forecasts of a globalized world in which nuclear deterrence no longer makes sense. With greater economic interdependence, this argument runs, even the so-called "rogue states" will be reconciled to the international order, renouncing or reducing their overt or covert nuclear arsenals.

Nuclear posture is the incorporation of some number and type of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles state's overall military structure, the rules and procedures governing how those weapons are deployed, when and under what conditions they might be used, against what targets, and who has the authority to make those decisions. Nuclear posture is best thought of as the operational, rather than the declaratory, nuclear doctrine of a country; while the two can overlap, it is the operational doctrine that generates deterrent power against an opponent. To put it bluntly, states care more about what an adversary can credibly do with its nuclear weapons than what it says about them.

All around [the Centre Pompidou and Beauborg Museum], the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone—remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygienic design—but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness. It is a bit like the real danger nuclear power stations pose: not lack of security, pollution, explosion, but a system of maximum security that radiates around them, the protective zone of control and deterrence that extends, slowly but surely, over the territory—a technical, ecological, economic, geopolitical glacis. What does the nuclear matter? The station is a matrix in which an absolute model of security is elaborated, which will encompass the whole social field, and which is fundamentally a model of deterrence (it is the same one that controls us globally, under the sign of peaceful coexistence and of the simulation of atomic danger). The same model, with the same proportions, is elaborated at the Center: cultural fission, political deterrence.

The dilemma of the AI age will be different: its defining technology will be widely acquired, mastered, and employed. The achievement of mutual strategic restraint — or even achieving a common definition of restraint — will be more difficult than ever before, both conceptually and practically. The management of nuclear weapons, the endeavor of half a century, remains incomplete and fragmentary. Yet the challenge of assessing the nuclear balance was comparatively straightforward. Warheads could be counted, and their yields were known. Conversely, the capabilities of AI are not fixed; they are dynamic. Unlike nuclear weapons, AIs are hard to track: once trained, they may be copied easily and run on relatively small machines. And detecting their presence or verifying their absence is difficult or impossible with the present technology. In this age, deterrence will likely arise from complexity — from the multiplicity of vectors through which an AI‑enabled attack is able to travel and from the speed of potential AI responses.

Soviets had their own atomic bomb, Kennan argued that it made no sense for the United States to get into a spiraling nuclear arms race. Like Oppenheimer, he believed that the bomb was ultimately a suicidal weapon and therefore both militarily useless and dangerous. Besides, Kennan was confident that the Soviet Union was politically and economically the weaker of the two adversaries, and that in the long run America could wear down the Soviet system by means of diplomacy and the “judicious exploitation of our strength as a deterrent to world conflict. . . .” Kennan’s eighty-page “personal document” might well have been coauthored with Oppenheimer, reflecting as it did so many of Robert’s views. Indeed, both he and Kennan took its reception as a plunging barometer, indicating the approach of violent political storms. Circulated within the State Department, Kennan’s memo was quietly and firmly rejected by all who read it. Acheson called Kennan into his office one day and said, “George, if you persist in your view on this matter, you should resign from the Foreign Service, assume a monk’s habit, carry a tin cup and stand on the street corner and say, ‘The end of the world is nigh.’ ” Acheson didn’t even bother to show the document to President Truman.

The answer is… nothing, except the force of deterrence. Peace with a dictatorship, or at least nonbelligerence with it, is achieved not by debilitating concessions but by powerful deterrence—not by weakness but by strength. The dictatorship that I was most concerned with was actually not Syria but Iran. On February 19, 1993, I published an article titled “The Great Danger.” “The greatest danger to Israel’s existence is not found in the Arab countries, but in Iran,”3 I wrote. I consistently argued that we must take action to prevent Iran from realizing its nuclear ambitions. All these arguments, based on history and common sense, were dismissed by the foreign policy elites in both Israel and Washington. The election of Rabin was seen as an opportunity to break the logjam and make a historic peace, beginning with Syria. But first one obstacle had to be removed. The Ford administration had given Israel a commitment that the Golan Heights would effectively remain in Israel’s hands. President Clinton’s secretary of state, Warren Christopher, was dispatched to Israel to change that. Christopher devised a new secret agreement by which the US would receive from Israel “a deposit”—an advanced promise to cede the Golan Heights in exchange for a future peace deal. This was required because Hafez Assad, the Syrian dictator, insisted on first receiving such an Israeli commitment before he would even consider moving forward with any political negotiations with Israel. As would later become evident, Assad actually had no intention of making a formal peace, but the Rabin government nonetheless agreed to a full withdrawal from the Heights in exchange for a peace agreement.

This is why, from this point on, no debt will be paid off. It can at best be bought back at a knock-down price and put back on to a debt market — the public sector borrowing requirement, the national debt, th e world deb t — having once again become an exchange value. It is unlikely the debt will ever be called in, and this is what gives it its incalculable value. For, suspended as it is in this way, it is our only insurance against time. Unlike the countdown, whic h signifies th e exhaustion of time, the indefinitely deferred debt is our guarantee that time itself is inexhaustible. Now, we very much need assuring about time in this way at the very poin t whe n the future itself is tendin g to be wholly consume d in real time . Clearing the debt, balancing up the books, writing off Third World debt — these are things not even to be contemplated. It is only the disequilibrium of the debt, its proliferation, its promise of infinity, which keeps us going. The global, planetary debt clearly has no meaning in traditional terms of obligation and credit. On the other hand, it is our true collective claim on each other — a symbolic claim, by whic h persons, companies and nations find themselves bound to one another through lack. Each is bound to the other (even the banks) by their virtual bankruptcy , as accomplices are bound by their crime. All assured of existing for each other in the shade of a debt which cannot be settled or written off, since the repayment of the accumulated world debt would take far more than the funds available. The only sense of it, then, is to bind all civilized human beings into the same destiny as creditors. Just as nuclear weapons, stockpiled across the world to a point of considerable planetary overkill, have no other meaning than to bind all human beings into a single destiny of threat and deterrence.

Trump survived all of this, seized the Republican nomination, and won, because in the end, he connected with a particular kind of voter who believes that knowing about things like America’s nuclear deterrent is just so much pointy-headed claptrap.

A true opponent of Russia would have championed a stronger U.S. nuclear deterrent. Clinton didn’t. As a nuclear war expert with long experience in government told me, our nuclear arsenal is so badly deteriorated after eight years of Obama, we won’t see a new replacement warhead until after Trump completes his second term in office. That is the extent to which Obama’s stewardship effectively sabotaged our strategic deterrent. And Hillary Clinton would have extended that sabotage.

Global climate change, over-consumption of natural resources, terror-fueled wars that led to xenophobia—these were our ancestors’ mistakes. Nations were starving to death, and people were being massacred in the thousands by radicals, and do you know what the other nations did? They did nothing. The second they stopped caring for each other is when they sealed their fate. They closed their borders. Instead of trying to save, they instead sought to preserve what they had left. This forced nations to invade in order to survive, and nuclear weapons no longer became a deterrent but a catalyst, ultimately creating a war that ended their world.

His powers of memory were awe-inspiring, but only about matters on which he had fearsomely concentrated his mind.

Thus in the first months of 1940 it was already clear to two intelligent observers that nuclear weapons would be weapons of mass destruction against which the only apparent defense would be the deterrent effect of mutual possession.

The [nuclear] deterrent does not cover the case of lunatics or dictators in the mood of Hitler when he found himself in his final dugout.

Nuclear weapons ought to put the governing elites and mass publics of nations which are potential victims in fear for their lives. And we shall assume that they do. But the reader should be aware that we have by way of proof for this assertions very little and contradictory evidence. We know much less that we should. We do not know that nuclear weapons will generate sufficient fear to deflect the aggressor from his course. We do not know how to establish a priori the point at which damage will be thought by the potential victim to have reached unacceptable proportions. We do not have firm evidence that terrorizing potential victims does deflect them, as it is alleged to, from their aggression; very different conclusions can be drawn from evidence than those propose by the proponents of deterrence theory. This last matter is particularly serious, and the answer to the question is raises strikes at the heart pf the belief that nuclear blackmail works

domination. Only deterrence and a credible threat to use nuclear weapons would halt Soviet expansionism. Eisenhower’s UN speech certainly held out the hope that

As wars have become less common, nuclear weapons have proved to be a major deterrent among major powers, and as regional conflicts and ethnic troubles bordering civil war have increased, the content of international relations has considerably changed. Besides, with the increasing role of trade and financial relations and of institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO), the study of international relations has become increasingly interdisciplinary, and politics and economy have become closely related inputs of our subject.

the TTAPS study and the wider debate it ignited helped drive home the absurdity of nuclear strategies dependent on massive deterrence. The United States and the USSR had created a situation where even a limited nuclear conflict would cause a climate disaster that could quite possibly, among other things, collapse global agriculture, dooming civilization as we know it. With these weapons, there was no destroying your enemy without also destroying yourself. It brought to mind Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Cold War dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviets create a “doomsday machine” that will detonate if a nuclear war starts, rendering the entire world uninhabitable. The TTAPS nuclear winter study revealed that we had, unwittingly, built such a machine. These results were widely discussed in the security communities of both superpowers, and are often cited as helping to motivate the partial disarmament that both sides undertook as the Cold War wound down. Anti-Greenhouse In all these studies, Pollack and his collaborators were discovering variations that can be induced, by changes in quantities of gases or suspended particles, in a planetary greenhouse.

The most important use to which he had put his memory was that he had stuffed an unprecedented number of mathematical constants and equations into it. Most of us have very few mathematical constants in our mind, perhaps only the up-to-twelve-times multiplication table. Johnny had put in his mind layers and layers of algebraic verities. These were the explanation of his extraordinary powers of mental calculation.

Islamic terror posed an unprecedented threat, because the usual rules of deterrence had no evident application. In military defense it can ordinarily assumed that an adversary can be dissuaded by increasing the cost of his action. The stability of the nuclear era depended on deterrence – the notorious “mutual assured destructive capability” of two state adversaries who wished to have their people and polity survive. A non-state actor such as al-Qaeda has no population held in thrall, and its cult of martyrdom sees death as unimportant.268 Thus, the task of the West became to anticipate and intercept specific operations, aided by disruption of the terrorist network’s infrastructure.

nuclear deterrents.

Dying for love was always an option, but what a grand adventure it would be to live for it instead.

India and Pakistan have nuclear bombs now and feel entirely justified in having them. Soon others will, too. Israel, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Nepal (I’m trying to be eclectic here), Denmark, Germany, Bhutan, Mexico, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Burma, Bosnia, Singapore, North Korea, Sweden, South Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan … and why not? Every country in the world has a special case to make. Everybody has borders and beliefs. And when all our larders are bursting with shiny bombs and our bellies are empty (deterrence is an exorbitant beast), we can trade bombs for food. And when nuclear technology goes on the market, when it gets truly competitive and prices fall, not just governments, but anybody who can afford it can have their own private arsenal—businessmen, terrorists, perhaps even the occasional rich writer (like myself). Our planet will bristle with beautiful missiles. There will be a new world order. The dictatorship of the pro-nuke elite. We can get our kicks by threatening each other. It’ll be like bungee jumping when you can’t rely on the bungee cord, or playing Russian roulette all day long. An additional perk will be the thrill of Not Knowing What to Believe. We can be victims of the predatory imagination of every green card–seeking charlatan who surfaces in the West with concocted stories of imminent missile attacks. We can delight at the prospect of being held to ransom by every petty troublemaker and rumormonger, the more the merrier if truth be told, anything for an excuse to make more bombs. So you see, even without a war, we have a lot to look forward to.

It’s useful to contrast the missileers’ dysfunctional culture with that of their navy counterparts who work in nuclear submarines. At first glance, the two groups seem roughly similar: Both spend vast amounts of time isolated from the rest of society, both are tasked with memorizing and executing tedious protocols, and both are oriented toward Cold War nuclear deterrence missions whose time has passed. Where they differ, however, is in the density of the belonging cues in their respective environments. Sailors in submarines have close physical proximity, take part in purposeful activity (global patrols that include missions beyond deterrence), and are part of a career pathway that can lead to the highest positions in the navy. Perhaps as a result, the nuclear submarine fleet has thus far mostly avoided the kinds of problems that plague the missileers, and in many cases have developed high-performing cultures.

Oppenheimer explained that nuclear weapons had created a revolution in foreign policy. No defense against them was possible, only deterrence, or frightening away adversaries through the threat of assured destruction.

Anything that you are hiding away has likely chance of getting used someday. If its use resulted in a great toll, how you’ve wished you’ve never kept it at all. Nuclear bombs are way good deterrence: Countries talk than outright belligerence. It’s just that if something is kept away, there’s likely chance it will be used someday.

The great virtues were that mathematics remained rigorously free from emotional content, free from ethical content, and free from political content. It allowed people to try to rise to the top by being reasoning scientists and scholars, instead of being bullying politicians or priests.

I want to make it clear, however, that although I am deeply opposed to war, I am not advocating appeasement. It is often necessary to take a strong stand to counter unjust aggression. For instance, it is plain to all of us that the Second World War was entirely justified. It "saved civilization" from the tyranny of Nazi Germany, as Winston Churchill so aptly put it. In my view, the Korean War was also just, since it gave South Korea the chance of gradually developing democracy. But we can only judge whether or not a conflict was vindicated on moral grounds with hindsight. For example, we can now see that during the Cold War, the principle of nuclear deterrence had a certain value. Nevertheless, it is very difficult to assess such matters with any degree of accuracy. War is violence and violence is unpredictable. Therefore, it is better to avoid it if possible, and never to presume that we know beforehand whether the outcome of a particular war will be beneficial or not.

The intermediate objectives for achieving U.S. defeat may be enumerated as follows: Make the Americans stupid – Disorient the people of the United States and other Western countries. Establish a set of myths useful from the standpoint of the long-range strategy. Examples of such myths: Josef Stalin is our “Uncle Joe,” a man we can trust; the Cold War was triggered by paranoid anti-Communists; Senator McCarthy blacklisted innocent people; President Kennedy was killed by Big Business and the CIA; the Vietnam War was fought on account of corporate greed; Russia and China are irreconcilable enemies who will not be able to combine their forces against the United States; the Soviet Union collapsed for economic reasons; Russia is America’s ally in the War on Terror. Infiltrate the U.S. financial system – Financial control through organized crime and drug trafficking. To this end the Eastern Bloc began infiltrating organized crime in the 1950s and, in 1960, began a narcotics offensive against the West which would generate billions of dollars in illicit money which banks could not resist laundering. In this way, a portal was opened into the heart of the capitalist financial structures in order to facilitate future economic and financial sabotage. Promote bankruptcy and economic breakdown – The promotion of a cradle-to-grave welfare state as a means to bankrupt the United States Treasury (i.e., the Cloward-Piven Strategy). Welfare simultaneously demoralizes the workforce as it bankrupts the government. Elect a stealth Communist president – As an organizer for the Communist Party explained during a meeting I attended more than thirty years ago, the stealth Communist president will one day exploit a future financial collapse to effect a transition from “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Exploit the counter-revolution – Some strategists believe that a counter-revolutionary or right wing reaction is unavoidable. It is therefore necessary, from the standpoint of sound strategy, to send infiltrators into the right wing. Having a finger in every pie and an agent network in every organization, the Communists are not afraid of encouraging counter-revolution, secession, or civil war in the wake of financial collapse. After all, the reactionaries and right wing elements must be drawn out so that they can be purged or, if necessary, turned into puppet allies. Already Putin is posturing as a Christian who opposes feminism and homosexuality. This has fooled many “conservatives” in the West, and is an intentional ploy which further serves to disorient the West. Take away the nuclear button – The strategists in Moscow do not forget that the neutralization of the U.S. nuclear deterrent is the most important of all intermediate objectives. This can be achieved in one of four ways: (1) cutting off nuclear forces funding by Congress; (2) administratively unplugging the weapons through executive orders issued by Obama, (3) it may be accomplished through a general financial collapse, or (4) a first strike.

The political situation of the United States is far gone, and so is the country’s military situation. To put it bluntly, we are presently vulnerable to a mass missile strike from China, North Korea, and Russia. Looking at the incapable Mr. Biden, the United States is already pre-decapitated. You can paint whatever Happy Face you want on it, but fraudulent optimism will not stop a Russian or Chinese missile when deterrence finally fails. And yes, deterrence is about to fail. The signs are visible on every side. Our nuclear missiles are overaged and rotting. We will not have new replacement missiles or warheads until 2029.

Many will agree with Valeriano and Maness. After all, nuclear weapons and tanks are thought to be irrelevant. The sheer destructiveness of modern war has supposedly rendered it unthinkable. But the destructive power of a weapon is precisely what makes it useful, especially when your objective is the total capitulation of your enemy. With better missile weapons, and better anti-missile weapons, Russia has begun to inch towards strategic nuclear supremacy. This is the kind of supremacy where America’s strategic deterrent is either destroyed in a first strike, or destroyed by Russian interceptor rockets. Meanwhile, the United States has an ABM defense so feeble, so decrepit, there is little chance it could stop a Chinese rocket let alone an advanced Russian Topol-M.

Deterrence has failed. So have all theoretical war strategies—passively in place for decades—to further the idea that nuclear weapons make the world a safer place. Euphemistic policies like “restoring deterrence,” “escalate to de-escalate,” and “resolve to restrain.” Policies that in this scenario are revealed to be their own ticking nuclear time bombs. Policies that seem destined to have failed. The idea that nuclear strategies like “tailored deterrence” and “flexible retaliation”—policies that promised nuclear war could be stopped after it began—are as full of folly as deterrence itself.

The logics of nuclear production and deterrence in the twentieth century relied on a serious game of perception management,

defense intellectuals, despite decades of energetic work, were never able to define the minimum nuclear capabilities needed to create deterrence,

Eisenhower’s “New Look” policy had three components: a smaller army, nuclear deterrence, and covert action. The first two were public. Few knew about the third.