Deterrence
Deterrence
Deterrence means threatening punitive retaliation
to prevent a foe from attacking. It differs fundament-
ally from defense, which means threatening to fight
back if attacked and deny an attacker its objectives.
The heart of the distinction is whether it would make
sense to carry out the threat.
Although the idea of threatening war to prevent war
is as old as the balance of power, deterrence was not
just a new word for that old idea. The idea of
deterrence originated with the atomic bomb. It was
first formulated in 1946 by Bernard Brodie, who tried
to capture what was revolutionary about the advent of
the nuclear era. First, a nuclear warhead was not a
weapon, in Brodie’s view, but a terrorist device, whose
blast and radiation effects made it inherently indis-
criminate. Second, the atomic bomb brought home the
fact of mutual vulnerability in a way that aerial
bombardment had not. Before the nuclear era, a
state’s armed forces had to be defeated before the state
and its centers of population could be held hostage or
destroyed at will. Once nuclear warheads were mated
to missiles in the late 1950s, the state and its populace
were defenseless. The balance of terror differed in
fundamental respects from the prenuclear balance of
power, according to Brodie. ‘The first and most vital
step,’ he wrote, ‘for the age of atomic bombs is to take
measures to guarantee ourselves in case of attack the
means of retaliation. Thus far the chief purpose of a
military establishment has been to win wars. From
now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.’ These
prescient insights became a matter of considerable
scholarly discourse. Regrettably they had little in-
fluence on nuclear policy.
1. Deterrence in Theory
The logic of deterrence, as Brodie and others
recognized, is inherently paradoxical. To deter nuclear
attack, it is deemed necessary to threaten nuclear
retaliation. Inasmuch as the cost of a nuclear war is
prohibitive, neither side would risk it. Yet that rational
calculus conveniently overlooks the irrationality of
retaliating for a nuclear first strike with a nuclear
second strike. Retaliation makes no sense unless the
second strike could eliminate the other side’s nuclear
forces and prevent it from launching another strike of
its own. That deadly logic led Brodie to the para-
doxical conclusion that what made deterrence work
was the possibility that it might fail, making it prudent
for neither side to tempt fate. The same logic led other
strategic thinkers to conclude that for deterrence to
work, it could not be mere bluff. The threatener had to
be willing to carry out the threat. For that to happen,
nuclear retaliation had to be automatic or mad.
Herman Kahn (1960) captured the sense of that line of
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reasoning in a phrase, the ‘rationality of irrationality.’
Yet that line of reasoning only posed another paradox:
if the deterrer was hotheaded, why would the attacker
be prudent?
Even if the threat of retaliation ruled out nuclear
war, that seemed to leave the world safe for war waged
by other than nuclear means. That was a source of
gnawing anxiety for the USA, which was committed
by treaty to deter any attack by the USSR on its allies
in Western Europe. It did not have the capability to do
that by conventional military means alone, at least in
the 1950s, so it chose to rely on the threat to initiate
nuclear war. That threat was potentially suicidal.
Some strategists insisted that ‘extended deterrence,’
as that threat came to be called, would work if the
USA had nuclear superiority. Thomas Schelling (1966)
questioned whether superiority assured that the
weaker side must yield to the stronger. It was impos-
sible, he insisted, to raise the risk of a nuclear war for
the other side without raising it for oneself. He spoke,
instead, of a ‘competition in risk-taking.’ Extended
deterrence still might work if Soviet leaders could not
be sure the USA would shrink from first use of nuclear
weapons in the event of war. Schelling (1960) called it
‘the threat that leaves something to chance.’ Such a
cosmic bluff prompted a preoccupation with ‘credi-
bility’ and a willingness to run seemingly irrational
risks to shore up an incredible threat. McGeorge
Bundy (1983) came up with a less demanding alter-
native,‘existential deterrence.’ So long as a state
possessed nuclear arms, Bundy argued, it had a latent
ability to use them, even if it did not explicitly threaten
to do so. The mere existence of these arms and the
incalculable costs of a nuclear war exerted a cautionary
effect on potential foes.
Other strategic thinkers took a more forceful tack.
British strategist Basil Liddell Hart (1946) first formu-
lated the idea of graduated deterrence, carefully
calibrated to threaten greater costs to an attacker
without generating all-out war. Still others debated
whether military forces or civilians were the most
appropriate targets for nuclear attack. This line of
thought culminated in the baroque escalation ladder
of Herman Kahn (1960) and the contention of some of
his followers that the USA could deter any aggression
if it somehow had ‘escalation dominance,’ or military
superiority at every level of violence, short of all-out
nuclear war. Yet the idea of waging limited nuclear
war and controlling escalation raised the question of
how a nuclear war could stop, short of a dead end.
2. Deterrence in Practice
Deterrence, in short, did not work very well in
theory. What happened in practice was in many ways
worse. Deterrence did not govern the production,
deployment, or military plans for nuclear arms (Ball

1978). The number of Soviet and US warheads vastly
exceeded what was needed for deterrence. The war-
heads themselves were initially deployed in ways that
made them vulnerable to attack. Dispersing them on
land and at sea reduced, though did not eliminate their
vulnerability, and made command-and-control all the
more precarious. Because of the chance that the cosmic
bluff could be called, each side drew up detailed war
plans to destroy the other. Those war plans fully reflect
the deadly logic of deterrence: in the event that war
breaks out, nuclear arms confer enormous, some say
decisive, advantage on the side that strikes first. The
most urgent targets were the other side’s nuclear forces
and especially their command-and-control. Concern
about a disarming first strike led the USA to keep
some of its bombers airborne at all times and to put
others on alert, ready to take off at a moment’s notice.
It did the same with its missiles. This hair-trigger
posture, and the delegation of authority that it
necessitated, raised the risk of loss of nuclear control
in a crisis. Schelling (1960) called this predicament ‘the
reciprocal fear of surprise attack.’ As first one side and
then the other began mobilizing forces, the very steps
taken to deter a nuclear war might provoke one. Far
from exerting a cautionary effect on preparations for
war, that fear led both sides to a massive buildup of
arms, conventional as well as nuclear, which did little
to calm the fear.
That had important implications for theorizing
about deterrence. Although some theorists saw mutual
deterrence as a source of stability in international
politics, others saw it as potentially unstable in the
extreme. The first group emphasized the need to
demonstrate the capability and will to wage war, lest a
potential aggressor doubt a state’s strength or resolve.
By this way of thinking, conciliation was dangerous
because it might be mistaken for weakness or irreso-
luteness. A second group of theorists were led to a
renewed appreciation of the security dilemma, an idea
dating back to Thucydides, who noted that attempts
by one side to enhance or demonstrate its military
might prove self-defeating. By alarming its rival and
leading it to respond in kind, these measures would
leave both sides less secure. Such a vicious circle could
generate an arms race, or worse, trigger pre–emptive
war. These theorists saw the need to couple coercion
with conciliation, lest the interaction spiral out of
control. To some scholars, the difference between the
deterrence and spiral logic depended on each side’s
perception of the other’s intentions.
Where perception matters, so does the danger of
misperception. The fear that war is imminent is
sometimes irrational. Once it takes hold, it is not
amenable to a cool calculation of costs. The possibility
of pre–emptive war calls into question two major
premises of most theorizing about nuclear deterrence,
that statesmen will behave rationally in the heat of the
moment and that they can control the operations of
their armed forces. This led to critiques of deterrence
Deterrence
theory on the grounds that it was psychologically
naive and operationally uninformed. Robert Jervis
(1974), John Steinbruner (1976), and Scott Sagan
(1993) are leading exemplars of these approaches.
One side’s strategy depended on the other’s. So did
its security. Their interdependence was the central
feature of game theory. Whether the game of chicken
or the prisoner’s dilemma was the appropriate ana-
logy, many scholars who formulated the logic of
deterrence drew heavily on game theory for their
insights.
One consequence is that deterrence is largely de-
ductive and only weakly grounded empirically. An-
other reason for its weak evidentiary base is that
nuclear history everywhere remains cloaked in secrecy.
Without knowledge of the details of nuclear planning
and operations, it is difficult to determine how
much nuclear strategy is informed by deterrence the-
ory, if at all. A more fundamental reason why the
evidence for deterrence is less than compelling is the
epistemological difficulty of proving why something
did not happen in order to demonstrate that deterrence
worked. The obvious counter to the contention that
nuclear deterrence kept the USSR out of Western
Europe is that it never intended to invade in the first
place.
Because the side that is losing could still destroy the
side that is winning, safety in the nuclear era lay in
cooperation between enemies. That interdependence
made nonsense of traditional strategic thought. It also
called into question the very idea of strategy as a
rational relationship between means and ends. War, in
theory, if not always in practice, ‘is controlled by its
political object,’ Clausewitz had reasoned. Conse-
quently, ‘the value of this object must determine the
sacrifices to be made for it in magnitude and also in
duration.’ But what objective could possibly sustain
the full measure of sacrifice in a nuclear war? As
Lawrence Freedman (1981) concludes, ‘The position
we have reached is one where stability depends on
something that is more the antithesis of strategy than
its apotheosis—on threats that things will get out of
hand, that we might act irrationally, that possibly
through inadvertence we could set in motion a process
that in its development and conclusion would be
beyond human control and comprehension.’ Nuclear
strategy, understood this way, was a contradiction in
terms.
See also: Diplomacy; Genealogy in Anthropology;
War: Causes and Patterns
Bibliography
Ball D 1980 Politics and Force Le
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Press, Berkeley, CA
Brodie B 1946 The Absolute Weapon. Harcourt, Brace, New
York
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Deterrence
Bundy M 1983 The Bishops and the Bomb. In: New York Re
iew
of Books 10 : 30
Freedman L 1981 The E
olution of Nuclear Strategy. St. Martin’s
Press, New York
Jervis R 1976 Perception and Misperception in International
Politics. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ
Kahn H 1960 On Thermonuclear War. Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ
Liddell Hart B H 1946 The Re
olution in Warfare. Faber and
Faber Ltd., London
Sagan S D 1993 The Limits of Safety. Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ
Schelling T 1960 The Strategy of Conflict. Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA
Schelling T C 1966 Arms and Influence. Yale University Press,
New Haven, CT
Steinbruner J D 1974 The Cybernetic Theory of Decision.
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
L. V. Sigal
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Deterrence: Legal Perspectives
The criminal justice system (CJS) dispenses justice by
apprehending, prosecuting, and punishing law-
breakers. These activities also project a threat of
punishment. Deterrence occurs when some would-be
law breakers conclude that the price of crime is
prohibitive. General deterrence refers to the crime
prevention impact of the threat of punishment on the
public at large. Specific deterrence refers to the impact
of punishment on persons actually punished. The
actual experience of punishment may alter an indi-
vidual’s perceptions and opportunities. Also, persons
for whom general deterrence has failed may be
systematically different than the population at large.
For both these reasons specific deterrent effects may
be smaller than the subject of this article, general
deterrent effects.
1. A Brief Re
iew of Research on General
Deterrence
Deterrence research has evolved in three distinctive
and largely disconnected literatures—interrupted time
series, perceptual, and ecological studies (Nagin 1998).
1.1 Interrupted Time Series Studies
Interrupted time series studies examine the impact of
targeted policy interventions such as police crack-
downs or implementation of statutes changing pen-
alties. The best-designed studies mimic important
features of a true experiment—a well-defined treat-
ment regime, measurement of response before and
after treatment and a control group. Two classic
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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
examples are Ross’ studies of the impact on drunk
driving of the British Road Safety Act and of Scand-
inavian-style drunk driving laws (Ross 1982).
The great proportion of interrupted time series
studies have examined the impact of drunk driving
laws or of police crackdown, on drug markets, dis-
orderly behavior and drunk driving. A less extensive
literature has also examined the impact of gun control
laws and ordinances. Excellent reviews of these studies
are available from Sherman (1990) and Ross (1982).
Both reviews conclude that interventions are gen-
erally successful in generating an initial deterrent
effect. One exception may be interventions that in-
crease sentence severity. If judges or juries believe that
the penalties are too harsh, they may respond by
refusing to convict guilty defendants with the result
that the policy increases rather than deters the targeted
behavior. Indeed, Ross concludes that efforts to deter
drunk driving with harsher penalties commonly fail
for precisely this reason. Sherman and Ross are also in
agreement that the effect is generally only transitory:
the initial deterrent effect typically begins decaying
even while the intervention is still in effect. However,
in some instances, the decay is not complete even
following the end of the crackdown.
1.2 Perceptual Deterrence Studies
1.2.1 Summary of findings. The perceptual deter-
rence literature examines the relationships of per-
ceived sanction risks to either self-reported offending
or intentions to do so. This literature was spawned
by researchers interested in probing the perceptual un-
derpinnings of the deterrence process.
Perceptual deterrence studies have focused on ex-
amining the connection of illegal behavior to two
categories of sanction variables, the certainty and
severity of punishment. The certainty of punishment
refers to the probability that a crime will result in
punishment whereas severity refers to the seriousness
of the consequences to the punished individual, such
as prison sentence length.
Perceptual deterrence studies have been based on
three types of data: cross-sectional survey studies,
panel survey studies, and scenario-based studies. In
cross sectional survey studies individuals are ques-
tioned about their perceptions of the certainty and
severity of sanctions and either about their prior
offending behavior or future intentions to offend. For
example, Grasmick and Bryjak (1980) queried a
sample of city residents about their perceptions of the
risk of arrest for offenses such as a petty theft, drunk
driving, and tax cheating, and also about their
intention to commit each of these acts in the future.
In panel survey studies the sample is repeatedly
surveyed on risk perceptions and criminal behavior.
For example, Paternoster et al. (1982) followed a
sample of students through their three-year tenure in
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