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Deterrence, military strategy under which one power uses the threat of reprisal effectively to preclude an attack from an adversary power. With the advent of nuclear weapons, the term deterrence largely has been applied to the basic strategy of the nuclear powers and of the major alliance systems.
Reviews the history of nuclear deterrence and calls for a renewed intellectual effort to address the relevance of the traditional concepts of first strike, escalation, extended deterrence, and other Cold War–era strategies in today's complex world.
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each built a stockpile of nuclear weapons. Soviet policy rested on the conviction that a nuclear war could be fought and won. The United States adopted nuclear deterrence, the credible threat of retaliation to forestall enemy attack.
Mutual assured destruction is the principle of deterrence founded on the notion that a nuclear attack by one superpower would be met with an overwhelming nuclear counterattack such that both the attacker and the defender would be annihilated.
A Short Documentary History of U.S. Nuclear Posture during the Cold War. By William Burr. The 75 th anniversary of the dropping of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is approaching. The United States and the world had entered the atomic age at the moment of the secret test of an atomic device in New Mexico on 16 July 1945.
America's nuclear arsenal restrained the Soviet Union throughout the cold war. Critics maintain that nuclear weapons were a root cause of superpower conflict and a threat to peace.
The United States’ continued treatment of nuclear weapons as an anachronism of the Cold War has left the country ill-equipped to deal with the threat of coercive nuclear escalation from U.S. adversaries.
During the Cold War, direct deterrence involved discouraging a Soviet nuclear attack on U.S, territory; extended deterrence involved preventing a Soviet conventional attack on North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members.9 For obvious reasons, extended deterrence is more challenging than direct deterrence.
American Cold War policy relied heavily on nuclear deterrence: preventing attack by threatening the attacker with nuclear annihilation in retaliation. To be credible, such a policy required certainty that retaliatory forces could survive.
Over the past decade, the strategic rationale that guided the development of U.S. nuclear forces throughout the Cold War has been slowly eroding. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the demise of the Soviet Union ended the conventional threat to America’s European and Asian allies.