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The rise of hostile rogue states, new terrorist threats, and the proliferation of WMD and missile technology have all highlighted our need for an effective deterrence strategy in this post-Cold War environment. The fundamental questions of strategy we now face are to understand what and how we may be able to deter in a new strategic environment. Unfortunately, most of what we believed was true about deterrence during the Cold War is now misleading because international conditions have changed so dramatically. This conclusion does not suggest that we discard deterrence. It does, however, explain why our Cold War strategy of deterrence based on offensive nuclear forces and a mutual balance of terror must be reconsidered in toto.
This article is adapted from testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, Washington, DC, July 18, 2007. Portions of the text are also drawn from the author's forthcoming book, On Deterrence and Defense: After the Cold War (Fairfax, VA: National Institute Press, forthcoming, 2008).
Notes
Notes
1. Elaine Bunn, “Can Deterrence Be Tailored?” Strategic Forum, no. 225, Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University (January 2007): 3.
2. Winston Churchill, quoted in a speech by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress, February 20, 1985, available at http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument
3. Kurt Campbell, Robert Einhorn, and Mitchell Reiss, The Nuclear Tipping Point (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), p. 321.
4. Quoted in “North Korea's Nuclear Threat: Is U.S. Nuclear Umbrella Effective?” The Daily Yomiuri, March 20, 2007, available at, www.opensource.gov/portal/server.pt/gateway. See also, “Nakasone Proposes Japan Consider Nuclear Weapons,” Japan Times, September 6, 2006; and Tim Johnson, “Nuclear Taboo Slowly Giving War,” Miami Herald, September 24, 2006, p. 1.
5. “JDA Director General Kyuma's Remark Tolerating Passage of Nuclear-Armed Vessel May Make Three Nonnuclear Principles Lose [Their] Validity,” Naha Ryukyu Shimpo (Morning Edition), November 25, 2006, p. 3.
6. See respectively, Dana Linzer and Walter Pincus, “U.S. Detects Signs of Radiation Consistent With Test,” The Washington Post, October 14, 2006, p. A14; and Reuters, “S. Koreans Want Nuclear Weapons Due to North—Survey,” October 12, 2006, available at http://asia.news.yahoo.com/061012/3/2r7t9.html
7. “S. Korea presses U.S. over ‘umbrella,’” The Washington Times, October 21, 2006, p. A2.
8. See the discussion of the NPR in Keith B. Payne, “The Nuclear Posture Review: Setting the Record Straight,” The Washington Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 3 (Summer 2005), pp. 135–151.
9. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), p. 17.
10. See the statements by Richard Ben-Veniste and Major General Craig McKinley, in National Commission On Terrorist Attacks Upon The United States, Public Hearing, May 23, 2003, accessed at http://www.9–11commission.gov/archive/hearing2/9-11commission_hearing_2003-05-23.htm
11. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, p. 17.
12. See the discussion in Keith B. Payne, Nuclear Deterrence in U.S.–Soviet Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981), p. 33.