Strategic Stability: Contending Interpretations

My first question on approaching this volume was, What is strategic stability, or What are the different meanings of strategic stability My second was, Is strategic stability always, usually, or seldom, a good thing My third was, When strategic stability is a good thing, how do we arrange to bring it about Is it a weapons result, a diplomatic result, or a result of a common understanding I was brought up on the stability of mutual deterrence, half a century ago, and it was not all that difficult to understand. The Gaither Committee of 1957 had, after 12 years of the nuclear era, finally identified that deterrence via threat of retaliation depended on the recognized ability of a retaliatory force to survive an attack intended to destroy it, and that the U.S. retaliatory force was not able to promise its own survival. The international conference on measures to safeguard against surprise attack brought five western nations to Washington in 1958, before moving to Geneva to meet the five eastern nations. It became clear that the problem of surprise attack was not merely that it was dastardly, or worse than an anticipated attack, but that it might be attractive to a nuclear enemy if the enemy thought it might catch unlaunched response forces and destroy them, especially if the nuclear enemy feared an imminent attack by those very forces. Albert Wohlstetter s not yet published paper, Delicate Balance of Terror, circulated among the Washington conferees and had an immediate impact. Later published in Foreign Affairs January 1959, it became the decisive document contrasting delicate with stable. The stable terminology came from an elementary physics term, in which an equilibrium could be stable or unstable. A stable equilibrium was one that, if disturbed, could recover an unstable one, when disturbed, decomposed quickly. Balance was a synonym for equilibrium and delicate was a synonym for unstable. Wohlstetter s document was convincing