Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present:

Chapter 7: Nuclear Deterrence as a Combination of “Vulnerability-Invulnerability”Interaction in the nuclear area largely rests not just on hardware, but also on nuclear deterrenceformulas and concepts. The nuclear deterrence concept has a deep internal contradiction. On theone hand, it is aimed to minimize the likelihood of a war by making it abysmally destructive. Forthis purpose the state must have the nuclear forces that provide for annihilation of the adversaryand infliction of irreparable damage to the enemy even if such a state is exposed to a first nuclearstrike. On the other hand, in order to attain deterrence, it is necessary to make the threat of useof nuclear weapons credible and convincing. To this end, it is necessary to make nuclear war lessdevastating, but at the same time more probable. Such an approach constitutes the basis of theconcept of limitation of nuclear war—by the scope of the theater of military operations or by therules of limited strategic exchange. In order to increase the credibility of the likelihood of theuse of nuclear weapons, countries built up the counterforce arms of their strategic nuclear forces(SNF) and developed tactical (and operational-tactical) nuclear weapons. To put it otherwise, aswas mentioned above, along with the nuclear retaliation potential, a number of states have beendeveloping real warfare potential, and every new round of such activities, as a rule, was initiatedby the United States. And it is true that military-strategic and operational incentives andthe scientific-technical capabilities for such capacity building are practically unlimited. And thelimitations imposed by the sides to provide for strategic stability in the general interest are primarilythe derivatives of political decisions, which are based on serious scientific-technical andoperational-strategic expertise.Many experts believe that in reality there is no contradiction between the two aspects of nucleardeterrence: the better the country’s preparedness for war, the wider is the range of tasks that canbe fulfilled by its nuclear forces, and the more effective is its capacity to deter the adversary’sassault. However, the other side inevitably perceives the measures designed to maximize actualwarfighting capacity as proof of aggressive intentions and as an attempt to come out of the blindalley of mutually assured destruction through an opportunity to pursue and win a nuclear war.Obviously, there are considerable psychological (political-psychological) problems related to theacknowledgement of the existence of nuclear stalemate based on the presumption of mutuallyassured destruction; those problems were perceived by the Soviet Union and the United States inthe 1960s and 1970s. 62The fear on which nuclear deterrence rests has at least two guises: the fear of nuclear retaliation(“fear-1”) and the fear of losing to the other side (“fear-2”). “Fear-2” creates an extremely dangerousand destabilizing atmosphere, if triggered by the threat of the other side’s preemptive disarmingstrike. It is this guise of fear that encourages the arms race and whips up the qualitativeimprovement of real warfare capacity. However, such steps just invigorate the other side’s apprehensionthat it is dealing with an aggressor. Finally, such fear may play a fatal role in the event ofserious aggravation of the crisis situation and may give an impetus to delivery of a preemptivestrike.34Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present: Theoretical and Applied Questions