Rationality and Deterrence in Theory

and Practice
Rationality and Deterrence in Theory
and Practice
Keith Krause

Deterrence theory has been held up by some scholars as one of the most important and profound intellectual
innovations of twentieth-century inter- national relations. As Christopher Achen and Duncan Snidal argue, 'ra-
tional deterrence is a highly influential social science theory ... [that] has dominated postwar academic thinking
on strategic affairs ... [and] pro- vided the intellectual framework of Western military policy'.1 Others have
argued that the 'long peace' between the superpowers was the product of nuclear deterrence. These are neither
small nor uncontroversial claims, and their truth cannot easily be assessed. They presume that deterrence
theory presents a coherent and valid description of conflictual relationships be- tween states (under certain
circumstances), and that the theory has in some way been the foundation for national security policies.
This chapter will provide some of the tools needed to appraise deterrence theory by tracing the emergence of
the concept of deterrence the different stages in its intellectual development, the main lines of the so-called 'ra-
tional deterrence debate' and the various critiques that have been made of rational deterrence theory. Although
it will concentrate on the development of deterrence theory, along the way it will note the way in which the
theory informed (or not) the development of nuclear strategy and policy in the superpowers, and in particular in
the United States. The relationship be- tween theory and practice has sometimes been close and sometimes very
distant, but there is little doubt that the dominant way of thinking about 'rational deterrence' has, for better and
worse, tremendously influenced the politics of the nuclear era; and conversely that deterrence theory has been a
first-order intellectual puzzle precisely because of its clear connection to pressing issues of public policy. But
for those who hope that the end of the Cold War has opened up the path to a nuclear-free world, rational
deter- rence theory also proves a formidable obstacle.
120

What exactly is 'deterrence?' The most general definition is 'the use of threats to induce an opponent to act in
desirable ways'.2 In this respect deterrence can be considered an enduring part of the calculus of war and peace,
with nuclear deterrence merely being a special case in which the threat of punishment is overwhelming. But
in fact the concept of nuclear deterrence has been refined in several distinctive ways. First, deterrence is
usually distinguished from defence by its emphasis on 'a sharp, radical distinction between the power to hurt
and the power to defeat military forces- between punishment and victory (or as some writers have put it,
between "punishment" and "denial")'.3 Thus the first paradox of deter- rence (or at least of nuclear
deterrence) appears: as Glenn Snyder has put it, we in the nuclear age live with the 'possibility that deterrence
may now be accomplished by weapons which might have no rational use for defense should deterrence fail'. 4

Second, deterrence is usually distinguished from compellence, which is defined as 'an attempt by policy
makers in state A to force, by threat and/or application of sanctions, the policy of state B to comply with the
demands of state A, including but not limited to retracting actions already taken'.5 In other words deterrence is
a preventive strategy designed to avoid certain outcomes (such as war or aggression), rather than a strategy for
forcing others to bend to one's will. Although the line between these two ideas is somewaht blurred, the
distinction has in practice been a crucial one in empirical studies attempting to identify and assess the success
or failure of deterrence attempts, since compellence is harder to achieve than deter- rence, and many deterrence
situations tum out to be ones of compellence.6
Third, deterrence can be described as either a general condition of the relationship between states (a situation
in which opposing states maintain armed forces to regulate their relationship even though neither one is
considering an attack), or an immediate condition that comes into play when at least one state has expressed
an aggressive intent and the issuing of a retaliatory threat then dissuades the potential aggressor?

All of these distinctions have important implications for how we study deterrence, and for whether or not
scholars agree that it 'works', both as a theoretical description of state behaviour and as a rational state policy.
But in order to see how and why these distinctions have become important, it is necessary to trace briefly the
broadest outlines of how deterrence theory and practice emerged.

The Emergence of Deterrence Theory

The nuclear 'revolution' catalysed by the explosion of a nuclear bomb above Hiroshima in 1945 was in fact no
such thing to contemporary observers.8

Keith Krause 121

122 Rationality and Deterrence

Although everyone recognised the enormous destructive power of the new weapon, the atomic bomb
did not render all previous strategic thought obsolete, nor did it immediately give rise to a theory of
nuclear deterrence that made the various distinctions noted above. In fact the first writings on the
bomb attempted to assimilate it into existing doctrines of strategic bombardment and air power. The
differences between the conventional bombings of Dresden and Tokyo and the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not qualitative, and the psychological impact of Hir- oshima needs to
be seen against the backdrop of the enormous destruction of the Second World War. As a result, most
policy makers believed that nuclear weapons could and would be used to fight, and perhaps to win,
wars. On several occasions in the late 1940s and 1950s various officials in the US government
advocated the use of nuclear weapons, in particular during the Korean war. 9 But the incalculable
consequences of nuclear use, especially after the Soviet Union had acquired its own nuclear weapons,
meant that nuclear use appears never to have been seriously contemplated at the highest levels.

Prescient observers such as Bernard Brodie were quick to grasp the change in thinking that nuclear
strategy involved, but they were in a minority. As Brodie put it in the late 1940s, 'thus far the chief
purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to
avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.' Brodie went on to observe that 'the first and
most vital step in any Amer- ican security program for the age of atomic bombs is to take measures to
guarantee ourselves in case of attack the possibility of retaliation in kind'. 10 These two points -
assured retaliation as the basis of deterrence and avoiding as opposed to winning wars as the basis of
strategy - eventually became the keynotes of almost all writing on nuclear deterrence. But this
distinction between avoiding and winning wars (which is similar to the distinction between deterrence
and defence noted above) implies that there is a great difference between conventional and nuclear
deterrence. I will not attempt to untangle this argument, but you should note that if nuclear deterrence
is conceptually very distinct from conventional deterrence, then historical case studies are probably
not able to shed much light on the workings of the deterrence relationship between nuclear powers.

Precisely what all this meant for policy was not obvious. The first explicit US deterrence policy,
Massive Retaliation, was little more than a general- ised threat to base US defence 'primarily upon a
great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing'. 11 This of course
covered much more than nuclear weapons. In the Korean War, however, the Eisenhower
administration appears to have used this threat in a more concrete context, in order to push the
Chinese and North Koreans to the bargaining table. But the actual use of nuclear weapons was, as
noted above, rapidly emerging as almost taboo. Dissatisfaction with such a crude
policy, coupled with technological changes in nuclear weapons, engaged a wide range of analysts in work on
different aspects of deterrence theory. What emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s were the first
sophisticated attempts to elucidate the central elements of a 'rational deterrence theory' to guide policy.

The Golden Age of Deterrence Theory

The late 1950s and early 1960s have been called the 'golden age' of deter- rence theory. The Kennedy
administration, and in particular its secretary of defense, Robert MeNamara, brought into the policy process a
large number of civilian defence intellectuals who had studied and written about the complexities and
paradoxes of nuclear deterrence. Analysts such as Albert Wohlstetter, Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, Henry
Kissinger and Wil- liam Kaufmann found a wide audience for their views, and in some cases enjoyed a great
deal of influence.12

The emergence of this group of civilian defence analysts was part of the broader changes in security policy
wrought by the Cold War. The strategic rivalry between the United States and the USSR meant financial
resources were poured into new 'think tanks' and research projects, sponsored in large part by the US
Department of Defense. The most well known of these, the Rand corporation, was a temporary or permanent
home for many of the people mentioned above. Likewise the appearance of strategic parity be- tween the
superpowers (or at least its imminence) meant that crude reta- liatory doctrines such as the threat of Massive
Retaliation were considered inadequate and potentially dangerous. Massive Retaliation was perhaps an
appropriate form of general deterrence, but it did not represent a coherent or credible strategy for immediate
deterrence, nor did it solve the fundamental complexities or paradoxes of deterrence that were beginning to be
uncov- ered. The rapid advance of nuclear technology, and in particular the devel- opment of strategic
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), also highlighted the need to be clear about the requirements of
effective deter- rence. Finally, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which by President Kennedy's own estimate
brought the chance of nuclear war to between one third and one half, highlighted the dangers of nuclear
confrontation and led to various attempts to stem the arms race and stabilise the superpower rela- tionship.13

Four intellectual and/or policy innovations were important in this per- iod. The first was the realisation that the
requirements of successful deter- rence - namely a retaliatory capability, a credible threat and a reliable means
of communicating it (the 'three C's' of capability, credibility and

Keith Krause 123

124 Rationality and Deterrence

communication)- were not necessarily easy to fulfil. The capability require- ment involved what was called a
'secure second strike capability', and implied the ability to punish the aggressor with a retaliatory strike of
sufficient (or overwhelming) destructiveness after a surprise attack on one's own forces. This imposed serious
conditions on the design and operation of nuclear forces (such as keeping forces on hair-trigger alert,
dispersing weapons between submarines, missiles and bombers, or developing mobile missiles), especially
when rapidly growing strategic arsenals made it at least possible to imagine a 'decapitating' first strike.14 Of
course there were dilemmas and costs involved in these policies: in order to avoid the danger of nuclear
decapitation, for example, the chain of command had to permit lower-level officials and commanders to take
the initiative if communica- tion with the national command authority were cut off. This, however, increased
the risk of accidents or renegade action.

The problem of how to make a credible threat was in many ways more troubling and was perhaps the central
puzzle of deterrence theory. At first glance, credibility appeared to be a simple matter of making clear commit-
ments ('red lines') and of guaranteeing an automatic response. But perfectly clear commitments implied that
friends and allies who were not under an ironclad nuclear umbrella would be vulnerable to aggression, while
at the same time they seemed to remove from the equation the creative ambigui7s (or democratic accountability)
that is at the heart of political judgement. 5 Conversely, ambiguous commitments could open the way to
misperception and 'stumbling over the brink'. Ultimately, at the heart of deterrence theory was a dilemma,
summarised by Barry O'Neill as follows: 'to trust deter- rence is to believe (1) that the adversary will not act
suicidally, and (2) that the adversary thinks that you might react suicidally'.16 This conundrum has never been
effectively resolved, for two simple reasons. First, how could it ever be credible to threaten a nuclear attack
with enormously destructive consequences that were almost certainly disproportionate to the loss that one
would suffer? Second, even if national survival were at stake, how could it be credible to threaten to retaliate
after one had been attacked if this retaliation would only bring more destruction on oneself via another series
of attacks of whatever size?

The requirement of communication simply followed on from the two previous requirements. But while
communication in peacetime might be something that diplomacy could manage, it quickly became evident that
crisis communication posed different and more troubling problems. One was the question of signalling: how
could one ensure that specific moves such as raising the alert status of forces, cancelling military leave, recalling
diplomats or altering the normal business of government would be cor- rectly understood in a crisis situation.
Or, as the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated, how could one prevent routine activities such as intelligence
overflights or troop movements from appearing unusually provocative. A

second probelm was the question of crisis decision making, since it was clear that individuals and groups under
pressure, or bureaucracies and organisations in general, did not act in ways that guaranteed that 'rational'
decisions would be taken.17 Overall, meeting the requirements of deter- rence required finding the right balance
between clarity and ambiguity, between rationality and irrationality to maintain credibility, between a
punishment that was small enough to be credible and one that was large enough actually to hurt, and
between a capability that was secure enough for a second strike, but not so secure as to appear to be a first-
strike force. And no one had a magic recipe for finding this balance.
The second innovation was the attempt, ultimately abandoned, to devel- op a coherent strategy of limited
nuclear war. Authors such as Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn explored a series of possibilities for the
rational utilisation of nuclear weapons, but the absurdity of the exercise quickly became clear to most
observers.18 Kahn, for example, in a deliber- ately provocative work entitled On Escalation, sketched an
'escalation lad- der' of war that contained 44 steps, with nuclear weapons first being used at the fifteenth step.
As Lawrence Freedman somewhat dryly observed, 'to many people, the fact that anybody can find some 30
different ways to use nuclear weapons was quite perverse'.19 The end point was what Kahn called 'spasm war'
- the more or less uncontrolled use of the remaining nuclear weapons after armageddon had already arrived. But
few analysts believed that any nuclear exchange could remain limited (beyond the first one or two bombs},
could imagine the goals for which such a war would be fought, thought that the Soviet Union had any interest in
limiting such a war, or believed that governments could exercise this level of calibrated control during an
unfolding nuclear holocaust. This debate, however, did highlight the distinctiveness of nuclear deterrence.
The third innovation was clarification of the distinction between 'coun- terforce' and 'counter-city' deterrence
strategies. A counter-city deterrent strategy rested upon the threat to wreak unimaginable damage on an
opponent's civilian population by bombing cities and other 'soft' targets in retaliation for aggression. A
counterforce strategy, in contrast, was aimed at an enemy's armed forces. Massive Retaliation could be
considered a primitive 'counter-city' strategy, but it is easy to see how such a genocidal policy was repugnant
to many policy makers and alien to the thinking of most military men. It would also invite further destruction
in a second attack from an adversary's untouched arsenal. This, plus the development of new targeting
technologies and an abundance of weapons of all sizes, led to great efforts to develop 'war-fighting'
counterforce strategies that could reduce an enemy's military (and nuclear) power, and hence were supposed to
represent a more credible deterrent.20 But here another dilemma ap- peared: a nuclear strategy that targeted an
opponent's weapons could be seen as the preparation for a first strike, not as a policy of retaliation, which

Keith Krause 125

126 Rationality and Deterrence

would be pointless if the opponent's weapons had already been fired! And a first-strike policy was
threatening and perhaps destabilising.
The basic paradoxes of deterrence - that it was based on a threat that would be irrational to carry out
if the 'bluff' was ever called, and that it was based on weapons that appeared nearly useless for the
actual conduct of military operations - created a tension in policies that could not be effec- tively
resolved. The result was an oscillation in declaratory policy between counterforce and counter-city
approaches, as the contradictions and dilem- mas in one were pointed out and advocates of the other
succeeded in shifting attention to their preferred options?1 Hence US policy advocated Mutual Assured
Destruction (MAD) in the 1960s (a counter-city strategy that aimed at destroying 20 per cent of the
Soviet population and 50 per cent of its industrial capacity), while policy in the North Atlantic
Alliance became based upon a doctrine of Flexible Response (a nuclear-use strategy). In the early
1970s President Nixon's secretary of defense, James Schlesinger (who had spent time at RAND),
approved a policy shift called 'selective options', .a form of war-fighting doctrine that moved away
from assured destruction. And despite his earlier desire to move towards a so-called 'minimum
deterrent', in order to avoid being trapped on the horns of this dilemma President Carter too approved
a continued search for greater and greater flexibility in how nuclear weapons could be used.
The fourth and arguably most important set of innovations concerned what was called the 'strategy of
stable conflict'. It was based on the growing realisation, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis, that
a superpower nuclear confrontation would not be 'winnable' by either side, and that any nuclear
conflict would be an unprecedented catastrophe for all con- cerned. This view was shared by the
Soviet and US leaders and reinforced by numerous statements by high-ranking officials and
officers.22 In a sense, nuclear strategy became sui generis: it was lifted out of everyday national
security policy making and treated as a thing apart that followed its own, often counterintuitive, logic.
There are several examples of this logic, but I will only highlight two here.

The first unusual element of stable deterrence was the idea that defensive preparations such as civil
defence or antiballistic missile systems were negative, and could upset deterrence by making a
preemptive first strike less dangerous to an aggressor. This logic led the superpowers to sign the Anti-
Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABMT) in 1972, which eventually limited the deployment of such defensive
systems to one site, either around a missile field or the national capital. Foreswearing defensive
preparations ran dee- ply against the grain of military logic, and the acceptance of this by political
leaders points to the influential role of civilian strategists in policy mak- ing.23

A second unusual element was the importance of the 'threat that leaves something to chance,' or to put
it more provocatively, the idea of the

Keith Krause 127

'rationality of irrationality'. This suggested that if national leaders appeared willing to take unreasonable risks,
to contemplate costly or suicidal ges- tures, or to lose control over a conflict escalation, then their ability to
'win' in deterrence confrontations would be enhanced. There is some evidence that President Nixon and his
national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, cultivated this image during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The
implication of this, however, is that the attempt to create more options and more refined processes for
controlling any escalatory process, might in fact lead to the outcome one wanted to avoid. Although it was
difficult in a democratic society to appear to be willing to act 'irrationally', the fact is that the entire edifice of
deterrence rests upon a sort of 'irrationality': it is a threat to carry out an act that would be irrational to
perform if the circumstances it was intended to prevent ever came to pass.

The most famous exponent of these and other puzzles was Thomas Schelling, whose two books Arms and
Influence and The Strategy of Conflict set the stage for the emergence of formal models of deterrence.24 He
emphasised the importance of the common interests and tacit communica- tions that governed the unfolding
logic of a conflict, and made these ideas widely accessible (although not always without confusion), often
through a discussion of everyday experiences. For example 'salami tactics' (the idea that an aggressor could
achieve victory through a series of small aggressive moves, coupled with assurances that they were always the
last) was illu- strated with an everyday example:
Tell a child not to go in the water, and he'll sit on the bank and submerge his bare feet; he is not yet 'in' the water.
Acquiesce, and he'll stand up. No more of him is in the water than before. Think it over, and he'll start wading, not going
any deeper; take a moment to decide whether this is different and he'll go a little deeper, arguing that since he goes back and
forth it all averages out. Pretty soon we are calling to him not to swim out of sight.25

Another key issue was the idea of focal points around which people's behaviour will almost naturally converge
in the absence of formal or reli- able communication. As Schelling put it, 'people can often concert their
intentions or expectations with others if each knows that the other is trying to do the same. To demonstrate this
idea one need only try a simple experiment: 'prizes' are awarded to all students who manage to agree (in
writing) on a common meeting place and time for the following day without otherwise communicating to
each other their choice of where and when. In real life, such focal points may 'depend on imagination more
than logic ... on analogy, precedent, accidental arrangement, symmetry ... and who the parties are and what
they know about each other'.26 In the nuclear world, focal points were often translated as so-called 'firebreaks'
or thresholds that could not or should not be crossed if one wanted to limit a conflict. These included such
simple rules of superpower conduct as 'don't rock the boat',

128 Rationality and Deterrence

'don't attack an opponent's homeland', and perhaps the most important firebreak of the nuclear era- 'don't use
nuclear weapons'.Z7

The real strength of Schelling's work lay in its analytic foundations, which were less important to policy makers
but of great interest to scholars. Schelling's work was rooted in the emerging 'theory of games', and the logic of
stable conflict was first applied to nuclear deterrence by such people as Glenn Snyder, Bruce Russett, Daniel
Ellsberg and Herman Kahn.Z8 From this early work it was only a small step to 'rational deterrence theory',
which promised a parsimonious and seemingly powerful deduc- tive approach to the puzzles of not only
deterrence strategy, but the entire range of cooperative and conflictual relations between self-regarding and
autonomous actors. Although Schelling and his contemporaries did not use many 'formalisms' (such as
matrices, sequential game trees, and so on), his insights, many of which were in fact sociological or
psychological in nature, were taken up by a succeeding generation of researchers who attempted to formalise
them in rational deterrence theory.

The Third Wave' of Rational Deterrence Theory

1

The so-called 'third wave' of deterrence theory, which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, marked a parting of the
ways of academic theorising, declaratory policy and nuclear targeting strategies.29 In policy terms the 1970s
and early 1980s witnessed the series of shifts in declaratory policy noted above, but the gap widened between
the declaratory policy of the United States and its actual nuclear targeting strategies, contained in what was
first called the Single Integrated OperationalPlan or SlOP. The continued expansion in the number of warheads,
the growing accuracy of weapons systems and the complexity of command and control systems gave rise to an
increasingly sophisticated SlOP, which presented the US president with a frightening array of options for
destroying virtually eveiJ' conceivable militarily justifi- able target in the Soviet Union and China.3 On the
academic side, work focused on efforts to formalise and enrich the crude models deployed by earlier scholars,
while scholars also debated the strengths and weaknesses of rational deterrence theory (ROT) and its two main
(but related) challen- gers: psychological approaches to deterrence, and the so-called 'case study' approach.
Although it is possible to show that there were still important underlying links between the scholarly and
policy debates, they ceased to track each other closely and the movement of individuals between acade- mia and
policy circles became less significant.31

But what was 'rational deterrence theory'? In fact one of the problems faced by both proponents and opponents
is that the theory has rarely been

clearly specified, and many different versions exist. As noted above, RDT had its roots in the work of people
such as Schelling and Ellsberg, who specified in a mostly informal way the main elements of the theory and
developed some of the earliest formalisms. The most widely popularised versions were presented as the games
Prisoner's Dilemma and Chicken, both of which could be applied at least metaphorically to the superpower
confrontation. The scenario of the Prisoner's Dilemma is that two suspected criminals who have been arrested
and a public prosecutor needs a confes- sion in order to convict them. The suspects are put in separate rooms
and offered two choices: either they keep silent or they make a confession. If both remain silent, they are
convicted of a lesser offence and receive one year in prison. If one confesses, he or she gets three months in
jail and the other gets ten years. If both confess, they both receive five years in jail. The logic gives rise to the
choice matrix shown in Figure 6.1, with the results for prisoner A in the upper right-hand comers of each box
and the results for prisoner B in the bottom left-hand comers.

The 'solution' or equilibrium position (also called the Nash equilibrium and indicated in bold) is for both to
confess, since this is the least bad option regardless ofwhat the other person does. This can be seen by
tracing the logic for each choice. If prisoner B remains silent, prisoner A faces a choice of either one year or
three months in jail, and hence confesses. If prisoner B con- fesses, A faces a choice of either 10 years or five
years in jail, and hence

Silent

Prisoner B

Confess

1 year

10 years

5 years

Silent
1 year

10 years

3 months

Figure 6.1 The Prisoner's Dilemma

Confess
3 months

Prisoner A

Keith Krause 129

5 years

130 Rationality and Deterrence

confesses. The same logic leads prisoner B to confess. The analogy with nuclear deterrence is not hard to
imagine: both 'sides' could be forced into a conflict (or arms race) neither wanted by the lack of certainty
about what the other would do. In the absence of an external structure for creating 'trust' or enforcing promises,
it was impossible to avoid an outcome no one wanted. Incidentally the vow of silence in and threat of
retaliation between organised criminal associations serves precisely this purpose!
The second game, Chicken, was in some ways more interesting. It was based on the teenage practice of racing
cars towards each other at high speed on a dark road (or off a cliff for those who have seen Rebel without a
Cause). The first one to swerve was the 'chicken'. Of course the precise utilities for this game are more difficult
to offer because the alternatives involve such imponderables as 'honour' and death, but one can specify the
game in the same way, using abstract values to capture the costs and benefits. If both players swerve, both are
equal and gain or lose nothing. If neither swerve, both lose everything (-500). If only one swerves, he or she
loses 50 'honour' points, which the other gains.
This particular game does not have a stable equilibrium position, or a box in which both players' choices
converge, because both have an incentive to force the outcome to either the top right-hand or bottom left-hand
comers. On the other hand the interests of both are served by swerving, and there- fore some degree of
cooperative behaviour occurs naturally. The problem,

Player B

Swerve

Don't swerve

Swerve

+50 Figure 6.2

Player A

0 +50 -50

-50 -500 -500

Chicken

Don't swerve

however, is that this is not stable, because there exists a constant temptation to try to win by convincing one's
opponent that one is not rational and will take huge risks. To 'win' one may (in the metaphoric teenage game)
act drunken or boastful, throw paint on one's windshield to obscure one's vision or throw the steering wheel
out the window in order to force the burden of choice onto the presumably more rational opponent. Hence the
'rationality of the irrational', as explained above. Chicken was considered analogous to the situation of nuclear
brinkmanship (or immediate deter- rence) exemplified by the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the US and Soviet
leaders engaged in a confrontation in which the real possibility of a US attack on a Soviet nuclear installation in
Cuba was seen by both sides as potentially leading to a nuclear war.

The most important and interesting aspects of RDT were technically rather intricate and took the simple games
sketched above only as starting points. In fact there are 78 different 'ordinal' 2 x 2 matrix games of the kind
sketched above, with two players who put their preferred outcomes in rank order from worst to best (this
eliminates the need to specify precise numer- ical values). None of these will be discussed here, but it is worth
explaining the foundations upon which RDT was built. RDT (and most game theory) involved three
fundamental premises, summarised by Achen and Snidal as follows:

1. Rational actor assumption. Actors have exogenously given preferences and choice options, and they seek to
optimize preferences in light of other actors' preferences and options. . .
 2. Principal explanatory assumption. Variation in outcomes is to be explained by differences in actors'
opportunities. (Appeals to exogenous changes in pre- ferences, or to norms, roles, or culture, are temporarily or
analytically suspended.)
3. Principal substantive assumption. The state acts as if it were a unitary rational actor.32

These assumptions were borrowed from economics, where rational actor models have been widely used to
analyse the behaviour of individuals and firms under various conditions. In RDT, what these meant was that
states were assumed:

1. To be 'utility maximisers' who agreed how 'utility' was defined for their state (it was usually equated
with 'increasing power,' however that was defined!)
2. To have transitive and stable preferences that could be rank-ordered (if I prefer chocolate to vanilla,
and vanilla to strawberry, I prefer chocolate to strawberry- and I do not change my preference
often!)

Keith Krause 131

132 3.

4.

Rationality and Deterrence

To have a specified propensity to take risks (some leaders are willing to risk national survival to make huge
gains, others to accept small or no gains in order to preserve what they have).
To act 'strategically' in state interactions, in the sense of making use of available information to structure their
choices, and attempt to 'win' using whatever stratagems appeared best suited to that end.

It is important to note that these assumptions do not imply that rationality has any particular 'content' (it is a
purely instrumental means to achieve ends that are chosen otherwise), that one can attach a number to all out-
comes Gust that they can be ranked by their desirability) or that decision makers possess perfect information
about their environment, the probabil- ity of various outcomes or the preferences of an adversary, although early
models did assume this.33 Not surprisingly these assumptions have been subjected to varying degrees of
criticism, and these will be taken up below. Within this formulation, the central task of RDT was to elaborate
the conditions under which the use of threats could induce an opponent to behave in desirable ways, and more
specifically in the nuclear context, to examine the conditions for the achievement of a stable balance between
the superpowers that reduced the risk of nuclear war. Stable nuclear deterrence was equated with the uncovering
of possible equilibrium outcomes that represent 'non-nuclear war' results, however these may be specified. 34
The contributions to the elaboration of this approach for various aspects of deterrence theory have been
numerous, but from these I can highlight three issues that have preoccupied prominent analysts such as Steven
Brams, Robert Powell, Barry O'Neill, Frank Zagare and Harrison Wagner, and that led to the development of
often highly sophisticated mathematical models. These three issues were: how to model uncertainty and
different risk propensities, how to enhance credibility and resolve, and how to reinforce crisis stability. In all
cases the goals of the exercise were twofold: to develop more plausible deductive models, and to confirm or
refute the 'conven- tional wisdom' about how deterrence worked on the basis of the workings of these models.

The first issue was the question of how RDT could incorporate the uncertainties inherent in nuclear
confrontations. Simple rational choice models such as the Prisoner's Dilemma assume perfect information: each
actor knows the structure of the game, the nature of the payoffs, the probability of the various outcomes, the
order of one's preferences, and the preferences of the other actor. But nuclear reality is not at all like that, and
decision makers must labour under conditions of uncertainty, in parti- cular uncertainty about the intentions
and desires of adversaries, who may lie or bluff to conceal their real intentions. Some critics have used this
uncertainty to argue that 'the frequency with which statesmen are surprised by the way other governments
respond to challenges is inconsistent with
rational deterrence theory'.35 This, however, confuses a failure of deterrence with a failure of the model. In fact
most models predict that deterrence failures will occur, and RDT has attempted to model this problem of
uncertainty or misperception with the idea of 'incomplete information'. Incomplete information can be
introduced into the game in one of two ways: either an actor does not know the 'payoffs' or values its adversary
attaches to various outcomes, but can glean some information from re- peated interactions; or an actor does not
know how resolved or committed an actor is to defend itself or its allies, that is, what kinds of risks it is willing
to take?6

The second (and related) issue was that of the robustness of deterrence itself, and how to enhance the
credibility of the retaliatory threat upon which it was based. The traditional belief was that in a brinkmanship
crisis the state with the greatest resolve would prevail, and that the value both sides placed on maintaining the
status quo was crucial to a peaceful resolu- tion of the crisis. Along with this, however, was the so-called
reputation paradox: acting tough on small issues in order to establish a reputation for resolve could backfire
because even weak states find it relatively costless to act tough on small issues. These conclusions were drawn
directly from an analysis of the game of Chicken. But as the model underlying Chicken was made more
sophisticated, other, somewhat contrary, findings emerged. Powell's exploration of 'the search for credibility'
(the subtitle of his book, Nuclear Deterrence Theory) extended the simple game by making it a game of 'two-
sided incomplete information', meaning that neither party knows the resolve of their opponent or the
probability of both parties accidentally sliding over the brink, and by making it sequential, in the sense that
the game is played in a series of steps (unlike the one-off matrices drawn above), which imposes stricter
constraints on reaching an equilibrium.37 As a result Powell demonstrated that under certain circumstances the
state with the greatest resolve might not prevail, and that reducin~ mispercep- tion on questions of resolve might in
fact destabilise a crisis.3

The third issue was that of crisis stability, crisis bargaining and escala- tion. Different authors had different
purposes in mind here: some were interested in identifying the conditions that might ensure stability, espe-
cially in circumstances where one side might possess a first-strike advan- tage, and hence push the other side to
consider a preemptive first strike; others were interested in examining how game theory could be adapted to
model the evolution of a crisis in which there were a series of 'moves' by the two sides. In the former case,
scholars such as Powell highlighted that crisis 'instability results from a more subtle interaction of several
factors, of which the existence of a first-strike advantage is only one', and therefore to focus on nuclear
weapons acquisitions only in terms of first-strike advantages was too narrow.39 With respect to the latter issue,
scholars such as Brams developed the 'theory of moves' (similar to the idea of sequential games) to

Keith Krause 133

134 Rationality and Deterrence

model long-term stable equilibrium outcomes (as opposed to the short-term equilibria of most games), and
tentatively applied it to an examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, in which
US military forces were put on 'precautionary alert' (which implied prepara- tions for the use of nuclear
weapons).40 It is worth reproducing Brams' game tree of the Cuban missile crisis to illustrate how it worked: ·

us
Blockade i n H i a l ' l \ m m e d i a t e air Slrike

USSR (2,2)

M aintal/\ithdraw us {4,3)

Blockade s u b s e q u e n t l ! \Later air st•ke

(1,4) (3,1)
Key: (x, y) =(US rank, USSR rank); 4 =best, 3 =next best; 2 =next worst; 1 =worst; bold
outcome is rational outcome.

Source: S. Brams, Superpower Games (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 60, reproduced with the
permission of Yale University Press.

Figure 6.3 Game Tree

Each move is represented as a 'fork' with two branches. Once a choice is made (in this case the United States
chooses between establishing a block- ade or launching an air strike), the responder (the USSR) has two
choices: to maintain the missiles or to withdraw them. If they are withdrawn the game ends. If not there is
another round, with the United States facing a choice between maintaining the blockade or launching an air
strike. At each stage there are a set of preferences attached to the choice. These are given in the brackets next to
the end point of each branch. The preferences have been ranked (4 is the most desirable outcome and 1 the
worst outcome), and the US preferences are the first of the two numbers in the brackets. The method of
reading the tree is called 'backward induction', which starts at the end of

the game and evaluates the choices of the player at that turn. In this simple case, at the last 'turn' the United
States chooses an air strike (3,1) over continuing the blockade (1,4), since continuing the blockade in the face of
Soviet recalcitrance is the worst outcome for the United States. Working backwards, then, we cross off the
'blockade subsequently' branch (indicated by a slash stroke across the branch). The Soviet Union faces a choice
between maintaining (with an air strike outcome of 3,1 - its worst) or withdrawing with a 4,3 outcome. Since
the United States is then faced with a choice between an immediate air strike (2,2 - its second worst outcome)
and a blockade (4,3 - its best outcome), it chooses a blockade, and the result of the game is a blockade with
subsequent withdrawal one move later. Of course, how these preference orderings are derived was the subject
of some complicated probability calculations, and the trees can be extended by many more branches.

Ultimately the tools of RDT provided scholars with a powerful means with which to probe the logic behind a
range of issues connected with deterrence theory, including how reputations are established and assessed, how
threats are made credible, what role better communications play in stabilising crises and how repeated
interaction affects outcomes. Moreover, the writings cited above were based on sophisticated modelling
techniques that are impossible to present here. Whether these models were able to provide satisfying policy-
relevant conclusions is, however, another matter. In fact it is difficult to evaluate the so-called achievements of
RDT without some prior agreement on what counts as progress. The most common yardstick of progress for
RDT scholars has been internal: various authors have defended their work on the ground that it represents a
further ela- boration (usually but not always mathematical) of a particular model. Thus, for example, Powell
uses sequential games and incomplete information, while Zagare relies on the 'theory of moves' and three-stage
games.41 These authors have also suggested that their elaborations shed some light on real- world state
interactions. Yet if the standard of progress is external- shed- ding greater light on the workings of foreign
policy and state interaction - RDT has failed to progress much beyond the insights of scholars such as
Schelling, primarily because attempts to 'test' its propositions empirically against real-world evidence (a rather
straightforward canon of science) have been infrequent or impossible. The 'conclusions' of a mathematical
model in themselves do not represent scientific findings or progress in the absence of empirical referents.

Before discussing some of the criticisms levelled at RDT, it is worth briefly pointing out what contributed to
the attractiveness of rational choice approaches to the problem of deterrence. The first powerful impetus behind
RDT was its close fit with the predominant realist conception of interna- tional relations, as a struggle for
survival in an anarchical'state of nature' in which states could only rely upon their own wits and resources.
Realism's

Keith Krause 135

136 Rationality and Deterrence

central premises were that states were unitary actors whose leaders pos- sessed a clear vision of the 'national
interest', took decisions based on a rational calculation of the costs and benefits of various courses of action,
and had at least a rudimentary means of assessing their environment and their potential adversaries. In other
words the realist vision of interstate politics was a world of purely strategic interactions between states, outside
of any social or cultural framework, in which forms of communication were limited to signalling and acting,
and trust was difficult if not impossible to establish. There was a large leap in rational choice models from
using the individual as the unit of analysis (which works well for economists) to treating the state as the basic
unit, with the same properties, but the con- geniality of realism to rationalist approaches eased this tension.

The second impetus was the quest for scientific rigour, parsimony and universal models of behaviour based on
methodological individualism. RDT drew upon the contractarian and utilitarian ideas of thinkers such as John
Locke and Jeremy Bentham, and the popularity of economistic models of human behaviour (such as cost-
benefit analysis), to promise a logically coherent, yet flexible analytic tool that could in principle be applied
(with appropriate modifications) to an entire range of interactions, regardless of time or place. In fact, as
Zagare has claimed: 'I ... do not mean to suggest that deterrence relationships are unique to international
affairs ... [i]t frequently plays an important role in husband-wife, parent-child, employ- er-employee, and state-
citizen relationships, to name just a few'.42 But this vision of the world as composed of atomistic individuals
interacting stra- tegically and calculating their maximum gain, unable to establish any bonds of trust and
unconstrained by societal norms and rules, is only one way of conceiving social and international reality, albeit
one deeply embedded in Western culture. Likewise, in the absence of experience or experiments, the 'test' of
rational deterrence theory's power was logical. As Achen and Snidal put it, 'the power of rational deterrence
theory is conceptual ... [i]t derives from the under;ring logical cohesion and consistency with a set of simple
first principles'.4 As we shall see, however, matters were not so simple.

The Debate with Other Approaches

A wide gulf separates the proponents of RDT and supporters of other versions of deterrence theory. The two
most prominent direct challenges were posed by the psychological approaches championed by authors such as
Robert Jervis, and the case-study approach of scholars such as Alexander George, Richard Smoke, Janice Stein
and Richard Ned Lebow. In fact these

were not really distinct but rather closely related approaches to deter- rence.44 Instead of elaborating their
strengths and weakness in detail, how- ever, I will concentrate on their criticisms of RDT, and some of the
most common replies that have been offered.

The first question raised was how well RDT's basic assumption of rational, utility-maximising decision makers
corresponded to reality. As George and Smoke argue:

the contemporary abstract, deductivistic theory of deterrence is inadequate for policy application ... [since there are] aspects
of deterrence phenomena in real- life settings which may be critical for determining deterrence outcomes but which are not
encompassed by the simplifying assumptions of the theory in its present form.45

Lebow and Stein echo this view more trenchantly:

existing theories of deterrence are incomplete and flawed. They are poor predictors of critical cases of strategic behaviour
and equally poor guides to policy. Theories of deterrence do not consider the most important determinants of strategic
choice. These determinants are outside of and at times contradictory to their fundamental assumptions.46

These criticisms took on many more specific forms, some of which focused on the unitary actor assumption of
RDT, some questioned the assumption of rational behaviour, while others drew attention to the way in which
utility was maximised or calculated by decision makers. Thus, for example, organisational or cybernetic
approaches to deterrence (or to decision-mak- ing in general) argued that decision making processes in large
organisations or groups did not operate in ways that resembled the assumptions of the unitary rational actor
model, and contained various dysfunctional or orga- nisational interests that severely distorted policy choices. 47

There are two things to note, however, about this criticism. The first is that it does not necessarily invalidate
RDT, since in principle its assump- tions can be modified to take account of psychological or organisational
factors in decision making, such as a different propensity to take or avoid risks, and imperfections in decision-
making processes, such as the tendency to choose the first acceptable option that comes along, rather than
awaiting the 'maximum' gain. As Steven Brams and Marc Kilgour put it with respect to psychological
approaches:

doubtless, psychological factors affect players' perceptions of the enemy, the enemy's threats, and, more generally how
decision makers act in a crisis. In our view, however, there is no reason in principle why these factors cannot be
incorporated into game-theoretic models that allow for incomplete or imperfect information, the possibility of threats,
restrictions on strategy choices that the time pressure of a crisis imposes, and the like. . . . Thus, we believe the approaches
are complementary.48

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138 Rationality and Deterrence

Unfortunately, very little such work has been done in this direction, in part because it challenges the basic
premise of a unitary rational actor, upon which all formal models are built. The second thing to note is that this
criticism misses the target somewhat: the assumptions of RDT are not meant, according to its proponents, to
reflect reality, but rather are parsi- monious stylisations designed to generate theoretical insights. Some scho-
lars even go so far as to argue that the assumptions need not correspond in any way to reality - that the true test
of a theory is only how well it predicts outcomes. This response, as we shall see below, is inadequate.

A second axis of criticism that was taken up focused on the empirical or predictive value of the theory. On a
simple level, one could argue that RDT could not be tested, since 'little could be known about the likely
responses of human beings to any of the situations that they were liable to find themselves in during a nuclear
war - either in deciding whether to launch a nuclear attack, or in implementing this decision, or in anticipating
and suffering the results'.49 In other words the models were built with assump- tions about how decision makers
ordered their preferences and took deci- sions that could not be scientifically validated. Even if this can be
treated as an empirical question - that is, through surveys of strategists and decision- makers- 'virtually no
empirical data had been collected to check whether the structures of preference analysed by theorists actually
described real people's understandings of [deterrence] games'.50 Not surprisingly, they do not. It should be
noted that the idea of prediction is used here in two senses: to predict preferences, and to predict outcomes.
The former are actually assumptions of the model, but unlike other kinds of assumption, they must map onto
the preferences of actors in the real world (whereas, for example, the assumption that decision makers perform
the rational calculations con- tained in game theory models does not need to be 'true' in the world). The latter
requires that RDT go beyond the modelling exercise of finding equilibrium outcomes, and specify what rules
to follow to identify deter- rence cases, how predictions derived from the theory correspond to 'real world'
options and choices, and how these predictions can be falsified. Even if most of the assumptions of RDT do
not need to be 'realistic', in order to be 'scientific' the theory still needs to cope with the complexity presented
by the 'facts' of the real world, which are almost always in dispute. Without this RDT cannot be tested, and
cannot undergo the normal scientific process of theory improvement because it cannot be subjected to
refinements based upon its ability to predict outcomes in the world.

A third criticism is that the prescriptions derived from RDT models that drastically simplify the real world
should not be used to influence policy choices or outcomes. James DeNardo's extensive account of the 'intuitive
deterrence theories' held both by experts and non-experts, for example, 'predicts a pattern of nuclear preferences
[on such issues as arms control

Keith Krause 139 and weapons acquisition] completely unlike the ones you will find in any
familiar theory', and he concludes that:

all of our important theories of deterrence and the arms race . . . drastically misspecify preferences in the games they
describe ... descriptive accounts that reduce strategic preferences to shopworn categories like 'hawks, doves and owls' or
'hardliners and softliners' similarly fail to capture the richness, the diversity, or the anomalies that characterize real nuclear
preferences.51

Hence we cannot know that a particular prescription derived from ROT (say, concerning the appropriate
behaviour in an escalatory crisis) that is correct in the theory would not lead to a tragic outcome, given the
heuristics decision-makers actually use.

More concretely, some argue that ROT has created a status-quo bias in arms control and disarmament
discussions, and has even led to arms races.52 Since the goal of RDT is to find stable equilibria in games,
stability at whatever level of armaments, becomes the definition of success, and objections such as the
absurdity of defining a situation of MAD as 'peace' and that nuclear arsenals are a waste of resources, are
illegitimate if they threaten to undermine stability. Thus in the debate about large reductions in the strategic
arsenals of the two superpowers, scholars such as Michael May, working broadly within the assumptions of
RDT, conclude that 'at the level of 3,000 weapons, strategic force deployments would be set very close to the
plausible upper bound for the deterrent requirement', and that cuts below that level could be potentially
destabilising.53 But if one accepts arguments for 'existential deterrence', (the mere possibility of the enormous
destruction that could be unleashed by even a few weapons is sufficient to create stable deterrence), drastic cuts
to a few hundred warheads, if not fewer, become conceivable.54 'Existential deterrence' does not seem to be
based on rational utility-maximising calculations, but rather on a belief that the use of even one nuclear weapon
would be a tragic human and policy failure. This comes awfully close to a moral claim about nuclear use, but
may reflect policy makers' actual beliefs and preferences. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, for
example, has said that 'in my private conversations with successive Presidents - Kennedy and Johnson - I re-
commended, without qualification, that they never initiate, under any circumstances, the use of nuclear
weapons'.55

The most common replies offered by ROT theorists are easy to anticipate. First, they point out that no number
of case studies, however well re- searched, can amount to a theory of deterrence: as Achen and Snidal put it,
'lists of variables ... are not "theory"', and 'a typology [of deterrence successes and failures], no matter how
novel and insightful, is not an interrelated set of propositions from which powerful and surprising con-
sequences can be deduced'. They also argue, somewhat surprisingly in light

140 Rationality and Deterrence

of the empirical weakness of RDT, that 'the empirical testing of rational deterrence by comparative case studies
has been much less impressive'.56 With respect to policy relevance, the defence was stated clearly by Ellsberg
in 1961: 'unfortunately there has been a historical tendency on the part of policy-makers to reject the aid of
abstract frameworks ... on the grounds that they are "too simplistic," and then to make practical decisions on
the basis of much cruder, implicit, models'.57 In other words the alternative approaches are not as scientific, as
sophisticated or as rigorous.

More Fundamental Critiques of Deterrence

Behind this debate lies a deeper disagreement about social science, and about what kind of knowledge of the
world is most valuable. More funda- mental critiques of RDT have concentrated on the broader tapestry of
social science, upon which the design of deterrence theory has been embroidered, and hence address a number
of issues that are of importance throughout international relations and political science. Again, I cannot do
justice to all of the details, but I can at least raise the central issues that preoccupy critics of formal and
rationalist approaches to political science in general.
One of the first objections raised to deterrence theory (and not just RDT) was that it was culture-bound or
ethnocentric, and that it reflected a particularly American obsession with the rational calibration of the use of
force and the application of 'science' to tough political and ethical problems. The best example of this was the
divergence of views between the United States and the Soviet Union on the nature of deterrence: the evidence
consistently suggests that Soviet decision makers were extremely resistant to US formulations of deterrence,
including the distinction between deter- rence and defence, the desirability (or inescapability) of mutual
assured destruction, and the very meaning attached to the word 'deterrence'.58 These do not seem to have been
simply misunderstandings, differences in preference rankings or tactical ploys; they appear to have been rooted
in different 'strategic cultures': ways of thinking about war and peace based on historical experiences and
domestic political circumstances. As Ken Booth has pointed out, we have no strong reasons (at least in the
absence of any attempt at research) for presuming that opponents share a similar construction of the situation
at all.59 This is also the point made by the case- study or psychological theorists of deterrence. Of course one
could respond that RDT can incorporate a wide range of preferences, and that only its assumption of rationality
needs to be universal, but this too can be chal- lenged, albeit only on a deeper philosophical level.

This led directly to the second concern: the precise meaning of rationality employed within RDT. The simple
ranking of preferences, or assigning of numbers to different deterrence outcomes, rested upon an instrumental
or 'thin' conception of rationality in which any behaviour could be considered rational as long as preferences
were stable and transitive. Hence even suicide- national or otherwise- could be 'rational'. Zagare, for example,
opted for instrumental rationality in order to avoid the 'endless, and irreconcilable, debates about the
"rationality" of the goals that actors have chosen to pursue'.60 The problem is that we cannot easily accept that
the rationality of, say, a suicide bomber is equal to that of a concerned huma- nitarian without doing violence to
our intuitions about rational behaviour. This move also seems to remove reason from any role in arbitrating over
the choice of ends such as peace, or the avoidance of war for ethical reasons. If deterrence is understood as a
relationship embedded in a historical context of interaction, RDT cannot avoid the question of the goals and
purposes of particular foreign policies, which states invest great effort in conveying to others. Even RDT
theorists have recognised the subtle social and commu- nicative aspects of these sorts of relationships; as
Nalebuff notes, 'the value of a reputation depends on how others interpret it. This in turn affects the will-
ingness to create the reputation in the first place.'61

Hence the debates between actors are not simply about the nature of the game they may be playing, but about
which 'preferences' deserve our respect, which preferences should be weighted more heavily and what goals are
worthy of pursuit. The evolution of the deterrence relationship between the superpowers, as they groped
towards an understanding of their situation that allowed the achievement of greater security at lower levels of
armaments, seems to include this normative element, as do the repeated statements by retired leaders that they
would never have contem- plated authorising a nuclear attack except in the most extreme of circum- stances.
But the analytical apparatus of RDT allowed strategists (both academic and policy) to claim they had little need
to study or understand actual decision making or strategic policy, or to analyse the 'discourse of deterrence' that
grew up between Soviets and Americans, beginning with the earliest exchanges and extending to the detailed
discussions on arms control and the inextricably mutual nature of security in the nuclear world. Notions of
mutual or common security are not easily captured by RDT models, and these models cannot prescribe policy
efforts to create such shared understandings. Neither could RDT comprehend or predict the shifts in military
doctrine and the deterrence strategies of the Soviet Union under Mikhael Gorbachev, however well it might
post hoc be able to model his behaviour, given, of course, clear specification of his preferences. 62

These two lines of argument converge on a third critique of RDT, that the concepts central to deterrence
theory, such as 'credibility', 'reputation', 'resolve', and 'initiators and responders', make no sense outside a social

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142 Rationality and Deterrence

context of communication and interaction. Perhaps the most discussed example of the problem is that posed by
the assumption that a 'game' starts with a move by one side, and that scholars and decision makers can
unproblematically recognise who is the initiator and who is the defender in a deterrence situation.63 This
problem cannot be overcome by assuming that communication is unproblematic, or constrained only by
assumptions about imperfect information. Such things as credibility and reputation have no meaning or value
without a social context in which others can respect or recognises them. Yet as soon as it is acknowledged that
intentions matter, and that we are discussing a social relationship, 'the focus is not only on individual choice,
but on how the choosing agent reflects, discusses, trusts and distrusts, tries to build consensus, alters others'
perceptions of the world, and, in general, uses his or her capacities as a social being to identify problems, solve
them, and shape the environment'.64 This is not the world that RDT tries to capture, with its basic assumption
of autonomous actors determining their interests and interacting only to achieve their ends within a pregiven
game structure that they can neither alter nor escape.
Similarly the assumption that actors can easily identify the initiator and the responder in a deterrent situation
excludes the possibility that the debate might concern precisely who was the initiator and who the respon-
dent. The Cuban Missile Crisis illustrates this well: did it begin when the Soviet Union began to install
medium-range missiles in Cuba (as the initiator), or were the Soviets responding defensively to US
aggression against Cuba (the Bay of Pigs), or was the first 'initiation' the US blockade of the island, with the
missiles themselves being merely another deploy- ment, similar to the US installation of missiles in Turkey?65
In fact the unfolding of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with its probings, miscommunica- tions and range of actions
on both sides, does not resemble very well the game tree discussed above.

The final, but certainly not the least fundamental objection was that nuclear deterrence was ethically wrong.66
For critics, the abstractions of ROT concealed the fact that nuclear deterrence, at least between the super-
powers, was based on a threat of mass murder, genocide or extinction, which was not easy to square with any
notion of a just war, even when one's own survival was at stake. It was less difficult to argue that the use of
some nuclear weapons might be justified and proportional to the wrong suffered, but the escalatory risks
involved were still great enough to give pause. Although this particular objection was not directed at RDT per
se, but more towards the policies of deterrence that states adopted, two elements of it were pointed towards
deterrence theorists. The first was that RDT, and discussions of deterrence policies in general, had become a
sort of 'theol- ogy', with 'high priests' who understood the nuance and complexity of deterrence and who could
discredit or discount the views of ordinary citizens, in particular the members of peace and disarmament
movements.

The language of deterrence was abstract, sanitising, seductive and exclu- sive.67 The second charge was that
RDT actually made the problem of designing appropriate policies worse by closing off possible alternatives to
deterrence and fostering an illusion of control that was ultimately dan- gerous.68 As Barry O'Neill, a game
theorist himself, has pointed out, the ideas underpinning sequential gaming assume a certain unfolding of crises
and war that is certainly mistaken. Neither the United States nor the Soveit Union could, during a nuclear
exchange, have determined the targets of incoming warheads, and thus they could not have distinguished
between such things as counterforce and comprehensive attacks, which are essential to RDT models of
escalation.69 There is also no 'referee' to enforce 'turns' in the real world so decision-makers obey the logic of
sequential games, and when the fog of war fails to correspond to the neatness of the game theory, the strategist
who regrets that the catastrophe has come could reasonably be considered an ethical failure.

Conclusions

Whether we accept or reject RDT as an approach to studying the phenom- enon of deterrence, as a description
of the world or as a guide to policy, depends in large part on our view of its overall significance. If it is
nothing more than an interesting academic diversion that has had little influence on policy, then many of the
objections raised above are irrelevant. If, on the other hand, it is one of the most important and influential
theories to emerge from international relations, then a close scrutiny of its strengths and weaknesses is
warranted. No one has successfully arbitrated this debate, and the many authors cited above have widely
diverging views on the significance of rational deterrence theory. The best I can assert is that the close
connection between the world of scholars and the world of policy makers that existed in the 1960s has given
way to a much more diffuse relationship in which the specific analyses and prescriptions of RDT are little
heeded, but in which the world view that underpins it is widely shared in policy circles.
Perhaps the most interesting development in the past few years has been the public advocacy by many of the
principal architects of deterrence of the need for radical steps towards total nuclear disarmament. Robert McNa-
mara has argued, along with prominent colleagues on the Canberra Com- mission, that 'immediate and
determined efforts need to be made to rid the world of nuclear weapons and the threat they pose to it. The
destructive- ness of nuclear weapons is immense. Any use would be catastrophic.' 70 Similarly, in late 1996 a
group of nearly 40 British, American and Russian

Keith Krause 143

144 Rationality and Deterrence

officers issued a call for 'the complete and irrevocable elimination of the world's nuclear arsenal'. The group
included Field Marshal Lord Carver, the former British Chief of the Defence Staff, General John Galvin, the
former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and Russian General Alek- sandr Lebed.71 The evolution of
people such as McNamara from the cata- lysers and planners of the 'golden age of deterrence theory' to nuclear
disarmers ought at least to make scholars, students and policy makers reflect on the adequacy of basing our
collective security on any theoretical or practical constructs that promise theoretical elegance and parsimony at
the price of a clear and nuanced understanding of the forces and ideas that move men and women in the
world.