Deterrence means what now?
By Daniel Nexon at Duck of Minerva has a nice analysis of the latest meditation on nuclear weapons use to come out of the Pentagon:
Some of the reasoning of seems a bit muddled.
The draft says that to deter a potential adversary from using such weapons, that adversary’s leadership must “believe the United States has both the ability and will to pre-empt or retaliate promptly with responses that are credible and effective.”
This is nonsense. If the US wants to be able to deter a WMD attack it has to be able to credibly threaten to inflict serious damage on a potential attacker after it has attacked.
Sometimes I think that the boys at the Pentagon are dancing to a drummer that only they can hear. They seem to want to display toughness, and to think that toughness means doing something that a stereotypical 1973 anti-nuke hippie would find, like, seriously harsh, man. The problem is that such individuals only exist in the fantasies of College Republicans, Heritage Foundation interns, and eager young Pentagon staffers. To the rest of the world, such declarations seem bizarre, weird, confusing, and threatening.