Tailored Nuclear Deterrence vs Assured Total Destruction?
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the subsequent seventy-eight-year nuclear age has thankfully not witnessed the “next” use of such terrible weapons.
PETER HUESSY - WARRIOR SENIOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS ANALYST, SENIOR FELLOW - WARRIOR MAVEN, ATLANTIC COUNCIL, HUDSON INSTITUTEMAY 5, 2023
By Peter Huessy, President, Geostrategic Analysis, Senior Fellow, The Hudson Institute
(Washington DC) After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the subsequent seventy-eight-year nuclear age has thankfully not witnessed the “next” use of such terrible weapons. But this did not happen by accident as no bending arc of nuclear history moves in any particular direction.
What happened was a number of extraordinary Americans—Harold Brown, Edward Teller, General Bernard Schriever, General Curtis LeMay, Johnny Foster, General Larry Welch, Admiral Richard Mies, General Norton Schwartz, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger—painstakingly helped build and deploy a US nuclear deterrent under the direction of multiple American Presidents.
The resulting strategy of deterrence was not static, as the US moved from massive retaliation and mutual assured destruction to flexible response, including damage limitation, and then what some described as tailored deterrence, while adding to the strategic environment a creative mix of arms control and missile defenses and robust conventional capability, so that the conflicts after World War II such as the Korean and Vietnam wars never spread to general war between the superpowers.
https://warriormaven.com/global-security/tailored-nuclear-deterrence-vs-assured-total-destruction
