The false promise of supreriority : the United States and nuclear deterrence after the Cold War

This political analysis exposes the fanciful logic that the United States can use nuclear weapons to vanquish nuclear adversaries or influence them when employing various coercive tactics. During the Cold War, American policymakers sought nuclear advantages to offset an alleged Soviet edge. Policymakers hoped that US nuclear capabilities would safeguard deterrence, when backed perhaps by a set of coercive tactics. But policymakers also hedged their bets with plans to fight a nuclear war to their advantage should deterrence fail. In The False Promise of Superiority , James H. Lebovic argues that the US approach was fraught with peril and remains so today. He contends that the United States can neither simply impose its will on nuclear adversaries nor safeguard deterrence using these same coercive tactics without risking severe, counterproductive effects. As Lebovic shows, the current faith in US nuclear superiority could produce the disastrous consequences that US weapons and tactics are meant to avoid. This book concludes that US interests are best served when policymakers resist the temptation to use, or prepare to use, nuclear weapons first or to brandish nuclear weapons for coercive effect. In focusing on US nuclear superiority, contemporary scholars highlight capability asymmetries, or improvements, that only promise to override undesirable deterrence constraints; and they accept too readily that coercive bargaining tactics can compensate, rather than worsen, conditions when capability alone appears insufficient. In this, they understate the influence of assumptions about adversary intent--conjectures influenced by political, social, psychological, and organizational factors--that determine how parties act in a conflict, and whether they seek to avoid one. To compensate, The False Promise of Superiority reflects on deficiencies in US thinking about the Cold War nuclear balance to expose biases in current thinking about US nuclear superiority. It examines the exaggerated utility of coercive tactics, which include making commitments, manipulating risk, showing resolve, and establishing reputations for acting. It develops its points with revealing case studies of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Iran nuclear deal. It closes by discussing the implications for policy and analysis of a long list of perils and pitfalls identified in the volume.--provided by publisher In this book, James H. Lebovic argues that the policy approach to maintain nuclear superiority did not make sense during the Cold War and makes even less sense now. As he shows, the idea that nuclear superiority is an imperative still serves as the foundation for too much strategic policy in an era where utility of such weapons is highly questionable. Moreover, continuing to rely on them as coercive tools rests on deficient logic and is dangerous. Not only explaining why we remain stuck with a nuclear stance that is largely irrelevant to the era, this book also offers a way out of the type of thinking that keeps such policies in place