Since October 7, 2023, the term “deterrence” has circulated with increased frequency. There is one problem: as it is currently defined and understood, deterrence does not work.
The Oxford Essential Dictionary of the US Military defines deterrence as “the prevention from action by fear of the consequences. Deterrence is a state of mind brought about by the existence of a credible threat of unacceptable counteraction.” From this, readers can deduce that deterrence is a state of mind and a product of rational decision-making.
Basing security policy on either of these assumptions is foolhardy. It is challenging to calibrate deterrence. This requires distinguishing enough deterrence, where credible fear of counteraction keeps the peace, from too much deterrence, where credible fear of an opponent’s motives can lead to a preemptive attack.
First, some practical examples. Returning to October 7, 2023, it is possible to say Israeli deterrence failed. Since 1948 Israel has sought to maintain a level of strength and preparedness sufficient to prevent its enemies from planning and executing attacks, using the threat of overwhelmingly force to maintain deterrence against its enemies.
The first major sign of trouble with this approach came in 1968, months after Israel’s defeat of its Arab neighbors in the Six-Day War, when Egypt began preparing a response. This came in October 1973 with Operation Badr, the attack which kicked off the Yom Kippur War. Similarly, Hamas began planning its 2023 attack immediately after a major defeat nine years before in the Gaza War of July–August 2014.
In both cases, deterrence failed years before the actual attacks. Israel’s overwhelming military superiority simply delayed the inevitable response to a situation its adversaries saw as absolutely unacceptable. Israel, overconfident in its deterrent capability, discounted the danger when intelligence assets began to report trouble. Thus, a single-minded reliance on deterrence actually led to future conflict.
So much for recent practice. On the theoretical side, scholars and practitioners alike have sought to chart the proximate triggers of war. The Athenian general Thucydides offered a multi-dimensional explanation in his History of the Peloponnesian War. He believed conflict resulted from three factors: Phobos (fear), kerdos (self-interest), and/or doxa (honor or reputation).
Deterrence, as we have seen, relies on threats of force which induce phobos, and therein lies a huge problem: it ignores the crucial elements of self-interest and honor or reputation. Thucydides named phobos as a principal trigger for conflict, even as definitions of deterrence, the current paradigm for conflict prevention, cite its reliance on instilling phobos. As the French might say, not only does deterrence fail in practice, but even worse, it does not work in theory.
Nuclear Deterrence and Global Devastation
The shortcomings of conventional deterrence are well documented. Then there is its younger brother, nuclear deterrence. The story there is much simpler. Recent research on nuclear winter has lowered estimates of the megatonnage of nuclear detonations needed to trigger the phenomenon. Significant global effects leading to the starvation of over a billion people could be triggered by the use of as few as one hundred “small” Hiroshima-sized (total 1.5 megatons) explosions over urban targets.
This is extraordinarily bad news for the nuclear weapons priesthood, which has been chanting slogans of escalation dominance in government ears since the 1960s. The only rational nuclear deterrence that can be relied upon, it now seems, is self-deterrence, where a conflict which seems unwinnable by conventional means is now far more likely to appear unthinkable in nuclear terms.
Seeking a Realistic, Effective Alternative
Eliminating all nuclear weapons is clearly a necessary part of the journey towards lasting peace. But focusing on particular weapons is miscasting the problem and thus misunderstanding the nature of the solution. The world needs a transition away from the deterrence-based para bellum paradigm, the idea that achieving peace requires constant preparation for war, toward a new way of looking at conflict. This article proposes a radically different paradigm, Trinitarian Realism, which rests upon three principal assumptions.
First, in a concept borrowed from the Christian Trinity, one’s individual confession (peccavi) is important, but the collective and universal confession (peccavimus) is crucial in international peacebuilding. All need to recognize that each has sinned and fallen short, that no one comes to the table, any table, anywhere, with completely clean hands. Second, readers must truly grasp Carl von Clausewitz’s “remarkable trinity” in war, combining the irrational (war moves a citizenry to violence, hatred, and enmity); the non-rational (commanders face “the play of chance and probability”); and the über-rational (governments attempt to “subordinat[e war] as an instrument of policy”).
This guarantees wholly unknowable results. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out, “What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when engaging in deadly conflicts; wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it).” Finally, that the July 16, 1945, Trinity event at White Sands, New Mexico, the first nuclear explosion, introduced a global catastrophic risk arising from the multiple and wide-ranging ecological effects of nuclear winter.
A transition away from deterrence can begin by not reflexively demonizing anyone with whom there is a serious disagreement. Softening morality projections and focusing judgment on a better understanding of complex collective emotions is also helpful. We can do this with far greater humility, including recognition that we will get our assessments wrong.
Writing of diplomatic historian and Christian apologist Herbert Butterfield, political scientist Paul Sharp provided the bare bones of a three-dimensional replacement for deterrence which we call strategic compassion: “Butterfield’s writings on Christianity and international relations suggest…the moral principles of self-restraint [as antidote for fear/phobos], empathy [honor/doxa] and charity [self-interest/kerdos] upon which an effective diplomacy should be based.”
Finally, we believe that nations must abandon their attachment to nuclear deterrence postures for the reasons outlined above and must accept the eradication of all nuclear weapons—before they eradicate all of us.
Paul Ingram is a Research Affiliate and former Academic Programme Manager with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge University. Edmond E. (Ted) Seay III is a retired Foreign Service Officer with 26 years’ experience in arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. His final assignment was as principal arms control advisor to US NATO Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Council Ivo Daalder.
About the Author
Paul Ingram
Paul Ingram is a Research Affiliate and former Academic Programme Manager with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge University.
Ted Seay
Edmond E. (Ted) Seay III is a retired Foreign Service Officer with 26 years' experience in arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. His final assignment was as principal arms control advisor to US NATO Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Council Ivo Daalder.
The article does not substantiate the claim that “deterrence” is ineffective. Rather, it showcases that the authors do not want to engage with deterrence literature.
For one, definitions: Cold War authors have noticed that nuclear deterrence cannot deter all forms of attacks but also ensure that asymmetric attacks can be conducted more effectively. MC14/3 Flexible Response is clear evidence for this.
Thus, in short, the article largely bypasses 70 years of deterrence theory and debate—Schelling, Jervis, Freedman, Waltz, Morgan, Huth, etc.—which have addressed many of the critiques raised. Without engaging this literature, the argument appears underdeveloped and neither disarmament nor a serious debate about deterrence.
The article implies further that nuclear deterrence is invalidated by nuclear winter. This ignores decades of evidence that nuclear deterrence has prevented great-power war. The risks of nuclear use are real, but declaring deterrence “self-deterrence only” underestimates the empirical stability of nuclear dyads since 1945.
Focusing solely on the attack against Israel has severe problems associated with it; for one, the authors talk about deterrence but do not qualify which aspect they mean. Nobody ever implied that nuclear weapons would prevent an attack by Hamas.
Lastly, an alternative to deterrence is nowhere to be found.
Paul Ingram and I were pleased that our short piece on deterrence and its discontents was accepted for online publication by Global Security Review. We hope to build a dialogue on strategic stability and conflict with GSR readers so that we can thoroughly discuss our doubts about deterrence as currently understood and practiced, and perhaps expand on some of our arguments that were necessarily abridged by the 1,000-word limit.
We were therefore pleased when Captain Severin Pleyer of the Bundeswehr’s Helmut Schmidt University chose to reply with a critique of our piece. We must, however, take issue with several of Captain Pleyer’s comments:
>Thus, in short, the article largely bypasses 70 years of deterrence theory and debate—Schelling, Jervis, Freedman, Waltz, Morgan, Huth, etc.—which have addressed many of the critiques raised. Without engaging this literature, the argument appears underdeveloped and neither disarmament nor a serious debate about deterrence.
Captain Pleyer cites many of the giants of deterrence theory by name but fails to deploy their arguments, much less point out how these pioneers would invalidate our thesis. In fact, two of the giants mentioned, Thomas Schelling and Paul Huth, explicitly mention the importance of reputation – Thucydides’ doxa – to successful deterrence, echoing our own thesis that a total, monomaniacal reliance on fear – phobos – to create deterrence is misguided at best and unlikely to succeed:
“‘Face’ [is] one of the few things worth fighting over…‘Face’ is merely the interdependence of a country’s commitments: it is a country’s reputation for action, the expectation other countries have about its behavior.” (Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966) p. 124)
Huth, in turn, while raising doubts about the universality of Schelling’s thesis, yet offered his own support for the importance of reputation/doxa to deterrence:
“In a situation of attempted deterrence, the sensitivity of a potential attacker to military threats and challenges to its reputation make it difficult for a defender to undertake actions that demonstrate resolve while avoiding provocation. (Paul Huth, Extended Deterrence and the Prevention of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) p. 9)
Citing names without invoking arguments comes perilously close to committing a fundamental logical fallacy, the appeal to authority. Then there are Captain Pleyer’s comments on nuclear winter:
>The article implies further that nuclear deterrence is invalidated by nuclear winter. This ignores decades of evidence that nuclear deterrence has prevented great-power war. The risks of nuclear use are real, but declaring deterrence “self-deterrence only” underestimates the empirical stability of nuclear dyads since 1945.
There are several problems with this passage. First, the formalization of the nuclear winter thesis properly began with the 1983 publication by Science of “Global Atmospheric Consequences of Nuclear War” by Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack and Sagan (TTAPS). However, the next generation of nuclear winter scholarship began in 2007 with the publication of “Climatic Consequences of Regional Nuclear Conflicts” in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics by Robock, Oman, Stenchikov, Toon, Bardeen and Turco.
The latter paper pointed out that nuclear winter was no longer the exclusive property of Moscow and Washington, since advanced computer models had revised downward by orders of magnitude the explosive power necessary to trigger a nuclear winter event from thousands of warheads to 100 Hiroshima-sized explosions over urban areas. Now others, e.g., Islamabad and New Delhi, could initiate nuclear conflict and bring about deadly environmental consequences for much of the planet without any involvement by China, Russia or the U.S.
Thus, claiming that “decades of evidence that nuclear deterrence has prevented great-power war” somehow refutes our thesis (that nuclear winter has removed nuclear deterrence from the realm of useful crisis management tools) misses the point that atmospheric scientists have only recently come to grips with the true nature of nuclear winter and the accurate boundaries of its creation.
(Nor, for that matter, do we concede the point that nuclear deterrence is by any means “empirically stable”, since too many close-call and near-miss incidents have come to light in recent years which suggest that the absence of the use-in-anger of nuclear weapons since 1945 can properly be ascribed to sheer, dumb luck.)
>Focusing solely on the attack against Israel has severe problems associated with it; for one, the authors talk about deterrence but do not qualify which aspect they mean. Nobody ever implied that nuclear weapons would prevent an attack by Hamas.
Paul and I made it very clear in our post that our issue was with deterrence as an overarching concept, and most of our piece is explicitly devoted to conventional deterrence. We believe, in fact, that Israel and its history of conflict since 1948 make it the ideal test case for deterrence in all forms, since its opponents have ranged from coalitions of nations all the way down to criminal gangs. It was the spectacular failure of all-forms Israeli deterrence in 1973 and 2023, in fact, which led us to posit fundamental, even existential issues with deterrence as currently understood.
>Lastly, an alternative to deterrence is nowhere to be found.
As we stated in our post, our goal was to emphasize the importance of matching incentives to desired behaviors, in deterrence as in all aspects of political economy. A broader understanding of Thucydides’ three main conflict triggers will lead, we hope, to a better matching of incentives offered to potential opponents and the outcomes we seek from them. The dire position Israel finds itself in currently is for us the most eloquent warning possible of the dangers inherent in sole reliance on fear-inducing deterrence to prevent conflict.
We hope, in any event, to continue this discussion with other GSR readers and contributors. Please – tell us where you think our argument falls down, so that our mutual understanding can continue to grow!