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Strategic Stability: Contending Interpretations
Strategic Stability: Contending Interpretations
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When Secretary McNamara testified to the Senate that we were developing invulnerable systems of retaliation and that he was pleased that the Soviets were doing the same, some questioned why he did not prefer the enemy be susceptible to our attack. He answered that the Soviets could not possibly entertain any idea of attacking the United States unless they thought they were vulnerable to a preventive or pre-emptive attack. It made sense to the senators. “Too much stability” was recognized by some analysts as possibly immunizing a Soviet attack on Western Europe from a U.S. nuclear response, but after the 1962 Cuban escapade, that issue seemed to disappear.
Now we are in a different world, a world so much more complex than the world of the East-West Cold War. It took 12 years to begin to comprehend the “stability” issue after 1945, but once we got it we thought we understood it. Now the world is so much changed, so much more complicated, so multivariate, so unpredictable, involving so many nations and cultures and languages in nuclear relationships, many of them asymmetric, that it is even difficult to know how many meanings there are for “strategic stability,” or how many different kinds of such stability there may be among so many different international relationships, or what “stable deterrence” is supposed to deter in a world of proliferated weapons.
That is where this book, organized by Elbridge Colby and Michael Gerson, comes to our aid. It does not give us THE definition of strategic stability. It gives us a variety of perspectives from a varied group of authors who deal with different strategic relationships around the world and offer different perspectives. It is not a treatise but a collection of essays on different dimensions of strategy and stability as they arise around the world. It cannot be the last word on the subject since the subject will not stand still. But for now it provides as thorough an understanding of this subtle and complex subject as possible.
Now we are in a different world, a world so much more complex than the world of the East-West Cold War. It took 12 years to begin to comprehend the “stability” issue after 1945, but once we got it we thought we understood it. Now the world is so much changed, so much more complicated, so multivariate, so unpredictable, involving so many nations and cultures and languages in nuclear relationships, many of them asymmetric, that it is even difficult to know how many meanings there are for “strategic stability,” or how many different kinds of such stability there may be among so many different international relationships, or what “stable deterrence” is supposed to deter in a world of proliferated weapons.
That is where this book, organized by Elbridge Colby and Michael Gerson, comes to our aid. It does not give us THE definition of strategic stability. It gives us a variety of perspectives from a varied group of authors who deal with different strategic relationships around the world and offer different perspectives. It is not a treatise but a collection of essays on different dimensions of strategy and stability as they arise around the world. It cannot be the last word on the subject since the subject will not stand still. But for now it provides as thorough an understanding of this subtle and complex subject as possible.
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