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!

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.