the theory that the threat of nuclear war is enough to prevent an attack is called .

In this telling, the West’s nuclear deterrent prevented the USSR from invading western Europe, and delivered the world from the threat of Communist tyranny. Some supporters even maintain that deterrence set the stage for the fall of the Soviet Union and the defeat of Communism.

Photograph: Handout/Getty ImagesĪdvocates of nuclear deterrence insist that we should thank it for the fact that a third world war has been avoided, even when tensions between the two superpowers – the US and the USSR – ran high. Let’s start by considering the core of deterrence theory: that it has worked. But what has been touted as profound strategic depth crumbles with surprising ease when subjected to critical scrutiny. The public has been bamboozled by the shiny surface appearance of deterrence, with its promise of strength, security and safety. In his novel The Ambassadors (1903), Henry James described a certain beauty as ‘a jewel brilliant and hard’, at once twinkling and trembling, adding that ‘what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next’. Every government that now possesses nuclear weapons claims that they deter attacks by their threat of catastrophic retaliation.Įven a brief examination, however, reveals that deterrence is not remotely as compelling a principle as its reputation suggests. Importantly, deterrence became not only a purported strategy, but the very grounds on which governments justified nuclear weapons themselves. Winston Churchill described it in 1955 with characteristic vigour: ‘Safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.’ Thus, nuclear deterrence was born, a seemingly rational arrangement by which peace and stability were to arise by the threat of mutually assured destruction (MAD, appropriately enough). It can have almost no other useful purpose.’

But according to the influential US strategist Bernard Brodie writing in 1978: ‘From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.

Until then, the overriding purpose of military forces had ostensibly been to win wars. After the United States’ nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, war changed.

The theory that the threat of nuclear war is enough to prevent an attack is called .