On Nuclear War: Deterrence, Escalation, and Control

During the Cold War, and especially in the 1980s, there were some serious efforts in the academic and policy communities to study how a nuclear war could end. The subject of nuclear war termination should be reopened now because the threat of nuclear danger has changed from one of quantity to one of quality - who has nuclear weapons, and for what purpose are they intended? The political and technological environments relevant to starting and stopping a nuclear war since Nagasaki, neither the United States nor other great powers had though through how to abort a nuclear conflict in its early stages. This study will attempt neither to construct particular scenarios of war termination nor to examine important topics such as bargaining strategies or monitoring and veri cation of nuclear cease res. The focus here is broader, namely, the political-military contexts for the management of nuclear crises and post-crisis force operations, including escalation control and war termination. Speci cally, correcting the potential inability of states to terminate a nuclear war requires that military planners and policymakers rst accept the concept of nuclear war termination as feasible and desirable. There are considerable obstacles standing in the way of that acceptance, not the least being the intellectual resistance by many, based on the assumption that deterrence is undermined by a willingness to plan seriously for its possible failure.