The fundamental notion of deterrence is simple: it involves persuading someone to stop from doing something they don't want to do by presenting him with the possibility that doing so would result in consequences for him that exceed the benefits of the activity. This idea has gained traction. this concept in the administration of human interactions has always had a role to play. For a variety of reasons, the term "deterrence" gained special prominence in the nuclear context in the years following WWII. Nuclear weapons had a unique ability to display the prospect of disadvantage, and deep mistrust between East and West, based at least in Western minds on perceptions of a massively armed adversary with alien ideology and perhaps expansionist proclivity, generated fears that intolerable actions would be taken sooner or later unless this prospect was exploited. The technical growth of military capacity, as typified by nuclear weapons, convinced most people that the desire to prevent war, rather than having to conduct it, had taken on a new and particular urgency. War with maximal physical capacity could no longer be seen as only an inferior and unpleasant method of managing international affairs; it had ceased to be a method of managing them at all. The world faced both the necessity and the possibility—in effect, two sides of the same coin—of convincing anybody, no matter how unprincipled or sanguine, who might have been tempted to start a conflict with an advanced state over a critical issue that doing so could not possibly produce a net gain.
This concept is not difficult to understand in and of itself. However, figuring out how it works among the complexity of international relations and the terrifying presence of nuclear weapons is far from simple, and the nuclear half-century has seen a fair share of misunderstandings about it. The topic of deterrence in most security debates has properly concentrated on the enormous reality of nuclear weapons. However, it is a fallacy to believe that avoiding their use is the primary goal of deterrence, or that they are the exclusive means of deterrence. We must prevent all big battles between sophisticated governments, not just nuclear warfare. There are two explanations for this.
To begin with, the awful events of August 1945 did not signal that the war had suddenly turned ugly after being pleasant. It had not been pleasant earlier. The horror of the trenches in the First World War must not be forgotten, and the Second World War claimed the lives of almost fifty million people, directly or indirectly, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. The warm-sounding word conventional' should not be used to describe weapon classes such as those used in World War II and their much more powerful modern descendants. Second, non-nuclear conflict is horrifying in and of itself. It's also the most likely path to nuclear war—in fact, it's the only one, given the absurdity of scenarios in which the inferno is unleashed by mistake or via technological failure. When a more serious dispute has already erupted at a lower level, the risk would be greatest. As a result, war prevention must be used at all stages of military confrontation between nuclear-armed states.
On that basis, deterrence cannot be achieved solely by nuclear weapons. For reasons that will be discussed later, their employment against aggression at considerably lower levels of force is unlikely to be believable, and therefore their deterrent impact is unlikely to be successful. Military capability is also a continuum within which, as previously said, there can be no assured firebreaks. Its effect, whether in conflict or deterrence, works (or doesn't function) as a bundle, not as a stack of sealed boxes; a combatant who doesn't get his way on one level may always evaluate his choices on another. As a result, the several levels of military power are complementary and interdependent, and they all contribute to deterrence. It's also worth mentioning that the interplay of multiple levels in overall deterrence may assist to alleviate the burden that would otherwise lie on some of them if they were considered separately. The overshadowing nuclear component rendered it redundant for NATO to pursue the aim of guaranteed parity or adequacy at non-nuclear levels (whether ‘conventional' or other, such as chemical) throughout the Cold War, as both policy and force dispositions demonstrated. That goal which can be more elusive, unstable, and expensive without nuclear weapons—returns to the foreground.
The link between deterrent nuclear weapons ownership and their use has been widely misunderstood. Some have sought to construct a full disjunction between possession and usage, saying that the former need not contain any connotation about the latter, possibly in the hunt for a route past unpleasant political or ethical problems. On the other hand, there are arguments that deterrent possession necessitates a steadfast and implacable almost automatic willingness to fire if the situation warrants it. The truth is somewhere in between these two extremes.
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