Isegoria

Thomas Schelling explains the idiom of military action in Arms and Influence:

Contrast “un­conditional surrender” with “un­conditional ex­termination.”

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Italy and Japan, even Germany, could still exact a price in pain and treasure and in postwar stability, and they knew it; they could not win, once the tide had gone against them, but they could make our victory hurt us more or cost us more. The war was costly to both sides, and jointly we could stop it if terms could be negotiated.

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The United States wanted a Japanese government that could order soldiers in the Pacific islands to surrender and not to hold out indefinitely either in continuation of a lost war or as local bandits. The United States wanted the opportunity to impose a stable regime in Japan itself and to conduct a military occupation consistent with its political objectives and democratic principles. The United States wanted a surrender that acknowledged the decisive role of the United States with minimum credit to the Soviet Union and minimum Soviet rights of occupation; that required an early surrender, and one negotiated mainly with the United States. The United States wanted to demobilize a large military establishment and to enjoy the relief that goes with the end of a war; holding an invasion army in readiness for ultimate collapse, while a slow atomic bombing campaign reduced Japan to rubble, was expensive and undesirable.

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The Japanese government, in other words, still had important powers that it could withhold or yield—the capacity to cooperate or not—and therefore had important bargaining assets. The fact that it had infinitely more to lose than did the United States, in case no agreement was reached, should not obscure the fact that the United States could get little consolation out of its ultimate ability to destroy tens of millions of people. In terms of what the United States was bargaining for, the trading position of the Japanese government was not to be despised.

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As American troops approached victory on the outskirts of Mexico City in 1847, General Winfield Scott was “persuaded to hold his position and not attempt to force an entry into the City.” In his eagerness to secure the fruits of victory, he and his State Department colleague “were easily convinced that a forward movement of the army might cause a general dispersal of officials from the capital, leaving no one with whom to negotiate.”

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The Germans were exhausted, and the French too, when the Franco-Prussian War was brought to a close in 1871. The Germans possessed all that they wanted of French territory and the French had little hope of expelling them; but without complete victory (and often with it) it takes two to stop a war. The French could still exact a price from the Germans, and the Germans from the French. They had a common interest in closing the books on war, cutting their losses or cashing in their gains and putting a stop to the violence. The French wanted the Germans out, and the Germans needed security to evacuate. Both sides had an interest in keeping communications open, respecting emissaries and ambassadors and listening to the other side, and working out reliable arrangements for closing out the war.

Not all of the restraint in these wars was confined to the terminal negotiations. White flags and emissaries have usually been respected, and open cities, ambulances and hospitals, the wounded, the prisoners, and the dead. In battle itself, soldiers have shown a natural willingness to permit, even to encourage, enemy units to come out with their hands up, saving violence on both sides. The character of this restraint, its reciprocal or conditional nature, is even displayed in those instances where it is absent; where no quarter was given, it was usually where none was expected. Even the idea of reprisal involves potential restraint—ruptured restraint to be sure, with damages exacted for some violation or excess—but the essence of reprisal is an action that had been withheld, and could continue to be withheld if the other had not violated the bargain.

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Contrast the Korean War. It was fought with restraint, conscious restraint, and the restraint was on both sides. On the American side the most striking restraints were in territory and weapons. The United States did not bomb across the Yalu (or anywhere else in China) and did not use nuclear weapons. The enemy did not attack American ships at sea (except by shore batteries), bases in Japan, or bomb anything in South Korea, especially the vital area of Pusan.

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The Korean War is our one modern instance of a sizable, overt limited war conducted by well-organized armies representing both sides in the East–West conflict. To call it “restrained” is, of course, to take a very broad view; the density of fire and of manpower was comparable with the campaigns of both world wars. Both sides slugged it out with unrepressed fury: the troops fought for their lives; there was as little etiquette on the battlefield as in any theater of the Second World War; the stakes were high; and there was a strong sense of “showdown.” Restraint took the form of specific limitations on the fighting; within those limits, the war was “all out.”

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Nuclear weapons were known to exist on both sides, East and West, and whatever the estimates about their size and number they scared people; the Soviet Union held in reserve a tidal wave of military manpower and was not believed so vulnerable to attack, even atomic attack, as to be wholly intimidated from launching war in Europe. The consequence was a war in which the fury of battle was exceeded only by the preoccupation with violence held in reserve.

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Nuclear weapons were not used in the Korean War. Gas was not used in the Second World War. Any “understanding” about gas was voluntary and reciprocal—enforceable only by threat of reciprocal use. (That the Geneva Protocol of 1925 outlawed chemical agents in war and was signed by all the European participants in World War II does not itself explain the non-use of gas; it only provided an agreement that both sides could keep if they chose to, under pain of reciprocity.)

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“Some gas” raises complicated questions of how much, where, under what circumstances; “no gas” is simple and unambiguous. Gas only on military personnel; gas used only by defending forces; gas only when carried by projectile; no gas without warning—a variety of limits is conceivable. Some might have made sense, and many might have been more impartial to the outcome of the war. But there is a simplicity to “no gas” that makes it almost uniquely a focus for agreement when each side can only conjecture at what alternative rules the other side would propose and when failure at coordination on the first try may spoil the chances for acquiescence in any limits at all.

“No nuclears” is simple and unambiguous. “Some nuclears” would be more complicated. Ten nuclears? Why not eleven or twenty or a hundred? Nuclears only on troops in the field? How close to a village can a nuclear be dropped? Nuclears only when the situation is desperate? How desperate is that? Nuclears only on enemy airfields? Why not bridges, too, once the ice is broken? Nuclears only on the Yalu bridge? But once nuclears are available “in principle” for a unique and significant target, won’t it be easier to go on and find a second target, and a third, each almost as compelling as the one that preceded it?

There is a simplicity, a kind of virginity, about all-or-none distinctions that differences of degree do not have.

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National boundaries are unique entities. So are rivers. A national boundary marked by a river, as the boundary between Manchuria and North Korea was marked by the Yalu River, is doubly distinctive.

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They are merely lines on a map, but they are on everybody’s map and, if an arbitrary line is needed, lines of latitude are available.

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And what is so different about nuclear weapons? Is it the size of the explosion? Would everyone expect either side to observe a weight limitation on bombs containing TNT, drawing the line at one ton, or ten tons, or (if there were planes to carry them) fifty tons? And why is a kiloton nuclear bomb so different from an equivalent weight of high explosives dropped in a single attack?

It is. Everybody knows the difference.

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Apparently any kind of restrained conflict needs a distinctive restraint that can be recognized by both sides, conspicuous stopping places, conventions and precedents to indicate what is within bounds and what is out of bounds, ways of distinguishing new initiatives from just more of the same activity.

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And in limited warfare, two things are being bargained over, the outcome of the war, and the mode of conducting the war itself. Just as business firms may “negotiate” an understanding that they will compete by advertising but not by price cuts, and rival candidates may agree implicitly to attack each other’s policies but not their private lives; as street gangs may “agree” to fight with fists and stones but not knives or guns and not to call in outside help; military commanders may agree to accept prisoners of war, and nations may agree to accept limitations on the forces they will commit or the targets they will destroy.

Just as a strike or a price war or a racketeer’s stink bomb in a restaurant is part of the bargaining and not a separate activity conducted for its own sake, a way of making threats and exerting pressure, so was the war in Korea a “negotiation” over the political status of that country.

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Much of this bargaining is tacit. Communication is by deed rather than by word, and the understandings are not enforceable except by some threat of reciprocity, retaliation, or the breakdown of all restraint. Because the bargaining tends to be tacit, there is little room for fine print. With ample time and legal resources a line across Korea could be negotiated almost anywhere, in any shape, related or unrelated to the terrain or to the political division of the country or to any conspicuous landmarks. But if the bargaining is largely tacit and there cannot be a long succession of explicit proposals and counterproposals, each side must display its “proposal” in the pattern of its action rather than in detailed verbal statements. The proposals have to be simple; they must form a recognizable pattern; they must rely on conspicuous landmarks; and they must take advantage of whatever distinctions are known to appeal to both sides.

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A number of countries, including Germany and Britain, had formally subscribed to the code of behavior worked out by the International Committee of the Red Cross; it specified a number of things about treatment of prisoners, how to declare an open city, or how to mark the roof of a hospital. The details of this code had been worked out in advance, with some participation by the countries that ultimately adopted the code. And to a remarkable extent the code was adhered to by countries fighting against each other—remarkable considering that a bitter war was being fought, the conduct of the war was in the hands of “war criminals” in some countries, and the conduct of the war included civilian reprisals and other violent contradictions to the concept of a clean war. If one asks why the Geneva conventions were adhered to, to the extent they were, it is hardly an adequate answer that governments felt morally obliged and politically constrained to be on their good behavior. Moral obligation was notably absent among many participants in the Second World War; and being charged with violation of an “agreement” on the Geneva accords would have been a comparatively minor public relations problem for most of the countries concerned. Evidently there was self-interest in moderating some dimensions of the war, and compliance with the Geneva agreements has to be considered voluntary. It was voluntary and conditional; for the most part countries must have followed the Geneva accords to the extent they did in the interest of reciprocity.

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The United States had no legal obligation to anybody, not having subscribed to that convention. But evidently if the United States wanted to reach an “understanding” with its enemies, at a moment when diplomatic niceties could not be tolerated, the choice was to accept arbitrarily the convention that was available or do without.

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One difficulty with overt negotiations is that there are too many possibilities to consider, too many places to compromise, too many interests to reconcile, too many ways that the exact choice of language can discriminate between the parties involved, too much freedom of choice. In marriage and real estate it helps to have a “standard-form contract,” because it restricts each side’s flexibility in negotiation.

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While the attack was under way, President Johnson announced on television that the North Vietnamese attack had occurred and had to be met with positive reply. “That reply is being given as I speak to you tonight.” He said, “Our response for the present will be limited and fitting,” adding that, “we seek no wider war” and that he had instructed the Secretary of State to make that position totally clear to friends “and to adversaries.”

With only one dissent, the eleven Republican and twenty-two Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees were satisfied that the President’s decision was “soundly conceived and skillfully executed” and that, in the circumstances, the United States “could not have done less and should not have done more.” Republicans and Democrats, military and civilians, even some Europeans, with unusual consensus felt the action was neatly tailored in scope and in character—everybody, that is, with the possible exception of the North Vietnamese and the Communist Chinese. Even they may have thought so. As a matter of fact, theirs was the most important judgment. They were the critics who mattered most. The next step was up to them. America’s reputation around the world, both for civilized restraint and for resolve and initiative, was at stake; nevertheless, the most important audience, the one for whose benefit the action was so appropriately designed, was the enemy.

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And, like any bargaining process, a restrained war involves some degree of collaboration between adversaries.

No one understands this better than the military themselves, who in many wars have had a high regard for the treatment of prisoners. Aside from decency, there is a good reason for keeping prisoners alive; they can be traded in return for the enemy’s captives, or their health and comfort can be made conditional on the enemy’s treatment of his own prisoners. Collecting the dead is an even more dramatic instance of the non-conflicting interest in war, of a recognized common interest among enemies that goes back in history at least to the siege of Troy.

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When a dog on a farm kills a chicken, I understand that the dead chicken is tied around the dog’s neck. If the only purpose for punishing a dog’s misdemeanor were to make him suffer discomfort, one could tie a dead chicken around his neck for soiling the rug, or spank him in the living room every time he killed a chicken. But it communicates more to the dog, and possibly appeals to the owner’s sense of justice, to make the punishment fit the crime, not only in scope and intensity but in symbols and association.

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If the Russians restrict the travel of our diplomats or exclude a cultural visit, our first thought is to tighten restrictions or cancel a visit in return, not to retaliate in fisheries or commerce. There is an idiom in this interaction, a tendency to keep things in the same currency, to respond in the same language, to make the punishment fit the character of the crime, to impose a coherent pattern on relations.

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When Khrushchev in 1960 complained about U-2 flights, he hinted that Soviet rockets might fire at the bases from which U-2 aircraft were launched in the neighboring countries, Pakistan and Norway. Was this because the U-2 aircraft were a threat to him and he would eliminate it by hitting the bases from which they were flying? Probably not.

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There can be times when a country wants to shake off the rules, to deny any assurance that its behavior is predictable, to shock the adversary, to catch an adversary off balance, to display unreliability and to dare the opponent to respond in kind, to express hostility and to rupture the sense of diplomatic contact, or even just to have an excuse for embarking on a quite unrelated venture as though it were a rational response to some previous event. This is still diplomacy: there are times to be rude, to break the rules, to do the unexpected, to shock, to dazzle, or to catch off guard, to display offense, whether in business diplomacy, military diplomacy, or other kinds of diplomacy. And there are times when, though in principle one would like to conform to tradition and to avoid the unexpected, the tradition is too restrictive in the choices it offers, and one has to abandon etiquette and tradition, to risk a misunderstanding, and to insist on new rules for the game or even a free-for-all. Even then, the rules and traditions are not irrelevant: breaking the rules is more dramatic, and communicates more about one’s intent, precisely because it can be seen as a refusal to abide by rules.

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If one side in a crisis or military engagement steps up the conflict, abandoning some restraint or crossing some threshold, we can distinguish two very different determinants of the other’s response. One is the change in the tactical situation—the pressure to avert defeat or to recapture advantage by enlarging its own participation. The other is the incentive to make an overt response, to meet the challenge, to effect a reprisal, to “punish” the other side for its breach of the rules or to “warn” against doing it again, even to force the initiator to back down and observe the old rule, ceasing what he started or withdrawing what he introduced. The Chinese entrance into the Korean War appears mainly motivated by the first determinant, the tactical need to keep the American military from conquering all of Korea. There was no obvious “incident” to which they were reacting, no sudden change in American military conduct that released them from some “obligation” to stay out. In contrast was the American response in the Tonkin Gulf, based not on military requirements but on a diplomatic judgment of what the situation called for. Similarly, when Syrian artillery, which had often harassed Israeli military outposts and received ground fire in return, fired on civilians in late 1964 the Israeli response was to break the ground-fire tradition and use airpower to silence the batteries. I am told that an important consideration in this decision was that a serious departure from routine by the Syrians deserved a retaliatory break in the Israeli tradition—with the attendant risk of enlarging the war.

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A more important limitation that acquired status with time was the non-use of nuclear weapons in Korea. In retrospect this was one of major influence: it set a precedent that is fundamental to the inhibition on nuclear weapons today and to the controversies about whether and when nuclear weapons ought to be introduced. Had they been used as a matter of course in Korea—and they might or might not have been decisive, according to how they were used and how the Chinese reacted—there might have been a much greater expectation of nuclear weapons in subsequent engagements, less of a cumulative tradition that nuclear weapons were weapons of last resort.

As a matter of fact, if the United States government had desired to be free to use nuclear weapons whenever it might be expedient—in the straits of Formosa or in Vietnam, in the Middle East or in the Berlin corridor—there would have been a strong case for deliberately using them in Korea even without a military necessity. Their use in Korea could have retarded or eliminated any sensation that nuclear weapons were a different class of weapons; it could have established a precedent that they are to be freely used like any other weapon, would have reduced their revolutionary surprise and shock in subsequent engagements and would have raised the general expectation that, where nuclear weapons would be useful, they would be used. The Korean War itself was decisive in the precedent it set, in its confirmation that the decision to use nuclear weapons was, in a real sense and not just nominally, a matter for presidential decision, and in making nuclear weapons the hallmark of restraint in warfare. In 1964 President Johnson said, “For nineteen peril-filled years no nation has loosed the atom against another. To do so now is a political decision of the highest order.” 16 The nineteen years are themselves part of the reason why.

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Beliefs matter. Beliefs may not correspond to statements; official Soviet declarations that no nuclear war could be limited do not mean that Soviet leaders believe it—or, if they do, that they would not change their minds quickly if a few nuclear weapons went off. President Eisenhower used to say that nuclear weapons ought to be used like artillery, on the basis of efficiency, but that does not begin to imply that he really felt that way; his willingness to negotiate the suspension of nuclear tests is evidence that he was affected by the psychological and symbolic status of nuclear weapons. Even those who believe that the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons is sentimental folly and political nuisance, and that there is no rational basis for distinguishing explosions according to their internal chemistry, will nevertheless catch their breath when the first one goes off in anger, in a way that cannot be explained merely by the size of the explosion.

But beliefs do matter. If everybody believes, and expects everybody else to believe, that things get more dangerous when the first nuclear weapon goes off, whatever his belief is based on he is going to be reluctant to authorize nuclear weapons, will expect the other side to be reluctant, and in the event nuclear weapons are used will be expectant about rapid escalation in a way that could make escalation more likely. Virtually all of these thresholds are fundamentally matters of beliefs and expectations.

Another “ultimate threshold” that has appealed to some is the direct confrontation of Soviet and American troops in battle. There have been some who felt that a war could be restrained as long as the two major powers were not directly engaged in organized military combat, but that if infantrymen in Soviet and American uniforms, organized in regular units and behaving in accordance with authority, started shooting at each other, that would be “general war” between the United States and the Soviet Union, and it could stop only with the exhaustion or collapse of one side or both in a major war. It is hard to see how even a strong belief in it could have made this true; but it is an interesting bit of testimony to the symbolic character of these thresholds and restraints, and seems not only to make war an extraordinarily “diplomatic” phenomenon but would make the biggest war in the history of mankind a phenomenon of antique diplomacy reminiscent of the dueling etiquette of some centuries ago.

An important “ultimate threshold” that undoubtedly commands more assent is the national boundaries of the United States and the Soviet Union. If “limited war” has meant anything in recent years, it has usually meant a war in which the homelands of the two major adversaries were inviolate.

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Visible intent would be important. Suppose Soviet troops spilled into Iran during an uprising in that country, and Turkish or American forces became involved. Soviet aircraft could operate from bases north of the Caucasus, and a possible response would be an attack on those bases by American bombers or possibly missiles. To do more than symbolic damage the missiles would have to contain nuclear warheads; these could be small, detonated at altitudes high enough to avoid fall-out, confined to airfields away from population centers, and might easily make clear to the Soviet government that this was an action limited to the Transcaucasus as an extension of the local theater.

There is no doubt that this would be a risky action. It might or might not be militarily effective; and it might or might not open up some “matching” use of Soviet air strikes, perhaps also with nuclear weapons confined to military targets, possibly including American ships in the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean, possibly including Turkish air bases.

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Secretary McNamara’s policy of 1962 goes even further in suggesting that a major campaign against homelands might still consciously avoid cities. This was a proposal that homelands in the awful emergency of major war not be considered “all-or-none” entities. Even a major attack on military installations need not, according to McNamara’s declaration, have to be considered the final, ultimate, step in warfare, bursting the floodgates to an indiscriminate contest in pure destruction. He was talking about a much larger and more violent “limited war” than had theretofore received official discussion, but the principle was the same. What he challenged was the notion that restraint could pertain only to small wars, with a gap or discontinuous jump to the largest of all possible wars, one fought without restraint. His proposal was that restraint could make sense in any war, of any size, and that the traditional distinction between small restrained wars and massive orgies of pure violence, with nothing between, was not logically necessary—was in fact false and dangerous.

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Evidently the tempo of nuclear war is what makes people think it hopeless, or unpromising, to keep any relations with the enemy once the first city goes. If cities could be destroyed indefinitely, but at a rate not exceeding one per week or one per day, or even one per hour, nobody could responsibly ignore the possibility that the war might be stopped before both sides ran out of ammunition or cities. An enemy might surrender or come to terms; some truce might be arranged; the original issues that provoked the war might still receive some attention. National leaders could not neglect the fact that millions of people were still alive who would either remain alive or be destroyed according to how negotiations and warfare were conducted. No national leader would think of resigning his job and just turning the dial to “automatic,” letting the war run its course, as long as he had a country and a population to which he could feel responsible. And nobody would suppose that the enemy’s behavior had been ineluctably fixed in perpetuity by a decision to “go automatic.”

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But the Vietnamese war brought in a new element, new to the United States, if not to Algeria, Palestine, and other arenas outside the East-West competition. This was the direct exercise of the power to hurt, applied as coercive pressure, intended to create for the enemy the prospect of cumulative losses that were more than the local war was worth, more unattractive than concession, compromise, or limited capitulation.

This is yet a third species of limited warfare, and its implications are comparatively unexplored in the strategic literature.

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There are two special cases that fall somewhere on the borderline between qualitative limitations on combat, and the quantitative application of coercive violence. One is reprisal, the other is illustrated by “hot pursuit.”

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Coercion depends more on the threat of what is yet to come than on damage already done. The pace of diplomacy, not the pace of battle, would govern the action; and while diplomacy may not require that it go slowly, it does require that an impressive unspent capacity for damage be kept in reserve. Unless the object is to shock the enemy into sudden submission, the military action must communicate a continued threat. Furthermore, in a “com-pellent” campaign it may take time for the adversary to comply; decisions depend on political and bureaucratic readjustments; and it may especially take time to arrange a mode of compliance that does not appear too submissive; so diplomacy may dictate a measured pace.

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In military engagements the advantages of surprise, concentration, and timely commitment of reserves usually make it inefficient, perhaps disastrous, to withhold resources too long and to let them dribble slowly into battle. But a campaign of civil damage is often comparatively uncontested, able to be delayed or spread over time with no particular loss in efficiency. Unless there are defenses to be overwhelmed or enemy reinforcements to be preempted, haste may be of no value.

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Most of us, in discussing limited war during the past ten years, have had in mind a war in which both sides were somewhat deterred during war itself by unused force and violence on the other side. That is, we were not thinking about wars that were limited because one side was just not interested enough, or one side was so small that an all-out war looked small, or even because one side was restrained or both were by humanitarian considerations. We have mainly been talking about wars that involve some continued mutual deterrence, some implicit or explicit understanding about the non-commitment of additional force or non-enlargement to other territories or targets.

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This [bombing North Vietnam as “compellence”] was a new departure undertaken in rather specialized circumstances. First, the bombing itself was unilateral; the North Vietnamese were militarily unable to do anything like responding in kind. How such a war might go if both sides were capable of conducting similar and simultaneous campaigns against each other received no answer. Second, the Vietcong had already been using terroristic techniques of intimidation, against civilians as well as against enemy military personnel, and the war had never been confined to straightforward engagement. Third, nuclear weapons were not used; the weapons most peculiarly suited to civil destruction and the ones whose reciprocated use could accelerate most rapidly and get out of hand were not involved.

In fact, there was no hint that nuclear weapons were being considered in this role. But of course they would have to be considered if the adversary were China rather than North Vietnam, and undoubtedly would be considered, both for their greater effectiveness against a larger adversary and because it would become a much more serious war.

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Roughly speaking we have one limited war of the battlefield (Korea), we have several contests in risk-taking (Berlin, Cuba), and we have one example of coercive violence, North Vietnam.

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I see no reason to suppose that a war in Europe, if it should break out, would be a battlefield test of strength the way Korea was rather than a competition in risk taking, as Cuba was, or a coercive campaign, as North Vietnam has been.

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The suggestion has occasionally been made that if the Chinese or North Koreans again attack South Korea, if the Soviet Union attacks Western Europe or Iran, if the Chinese attack India, it may not be necessary to oppose them with force. A little violence may do the trick. Knock out a city, tell them to quit; knock out another if they don’t, and keep it up until they do. The earliest proposal I know of, and a provocative one, was by Leo Szilard, who delighted in putting his ideas in shockingly pure form. As early as 1955 he proposed that if the Soviets invaded a country that we were committed to protect, we should destroy a Soviet city of appropriate size. In fact he even suggested that we publish a “price list” indicating to the Soviets what it would cost them, in population destroyed, to attack any country on the list. On whether the Soviets might be motivated to destroy a city of ours in return, Szilard allowed that they probably would be; that was part of the price. They would get little consolation from it, he argued, and our willingness to lose a city in return would be testimony of our resolve. A cold-blooded willingness to punish the enemy for his transgressions, even if it hurt us as much as them, he considered an impressive display.

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But if we can talk about wars in which tens of millions could be killed thoughtlessly, we ought to be able to talk about wars in which hundreds of thousands might be killed thoughtfully. A war of limited civilian reprisal can hardly be called “unrealistic”; there is no convincing historical evidence that any particular kind of nuclear warfare is realistic. What often passes for realism is conversational familiarity.

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The idea, though, that war can take the form of measured punitive forays into the enemy’s homeland, aimed at civil damage, fright, and confusion rather than tactical military objectives, is not new; it may be the oldest form of warfare. It was standard practice in Caesar’s time; to subdue the Menapii, a troublesome tribe in the far north of Gaul, he sent three columns into their territory, “burning farms and villages, and taking a large number of cattle and prisoners. By this means the Menapii were compelled to send envoys to sue for peace.”

Nor were punitive reprisals confined to relations between a colonial power and its subjects; Oman describes this form of warfare between the Byzantines and the Saracens in the ninth century. When the Saracen invaded,

much could also be done by delivering a vigorous raid into his country and wasting Cilicia and northern Syria the moment his armies were reported to have passed north into Cappadocia. This destructive practice was very frequently adopted, and the sight of two armies each ravaging the other’s territory without attempting to defend its own was only too familiar to the inhabitants of the borderlands of Christendom and Islam.

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The pain and damage could also be aimed at intimidating populations, affecting governments only indirectly. Populations may be frightened into bringing pressure on their governments to yield or desist; they may be disorganized in a way that hampers their government; they may be led to bypass, or to revolt against, their own government to make accommodation with the attacker. Even a few nuclear detonations on a country, unless all news and communication are cut off, would likely dominate civilian life and cause evacuation, absence from work and school, overloading of the telephone system, panic purchasing, and various forms of disorder. (If all communications are cut to prevent the news from reaching people and outside radio transmissions jammed for the same purpose, the people may be even more scared.)

Terrorism usually appears to be aimed mainly at intimidating populations and perhaps separating them from their governments.

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Limited nuclear exchanges may suddenly look realistic to a decision-maker who is confronted with two familiar and “realistic” alternatives—massive obliterative war and large-scale local defeat.

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If tactically one side were doing well it might bend over backward to keep the war tactically pure and limited, picking targets that minimized nonmilitary damage. But if the other side were doing badly it would certainly recognize that, in the guise of tactical warfare, it could do an enormous amount of punitive damage.

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Graduated reprisal into the Soviet homeland (or into the West) might take the form of picking nominal targets that were “tactical” or “strategic” in a strictly military sense. But the motivation might become more and more that of subjecting the other side to unbearable punitive pressures, to demonstrate how frightening the war could become, and to intimidate with the threat of further expansion.

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For years most strategic analysts have thought of Communist China itself either as a minor theater in a major war or as an indirect adversary. Hardly anyone seems to have thought about what kind of war it would be or ought to be if the United States became directly engaged with China.

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To attack China was merely to give the Russians first strike in a general war. And in that war there was a main adversary, Russia, and all the United States had to do was to obliterate enough of China to destroy the regime, or to satisfy a revenge motive, or to use up whatever weapons it had that could not reach Russia.

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The attempt should be to minimize casualties, not to maximize them; there would be no reason to kill Chinese, and there is no historical reason to suppose that the Chinese people, by the hundreds of millions, are any worse threat than any other people except for the regime that heads them in disciplined opposition to us.

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If we did have a war with China, it could be either of two kinds. It could be an effort to destroy the present regime by destroying or disrupting the physical and social basis of its authority and control, with a simultaneous effort to minimize population damage. Or it could be an effort to coerce the regime to come to terms, to pull its troops out of India, to withdraw from Formosa, to disarm itself, or something of the sort. In either case, it is virtually certain that we would not and should not rely on our strategic missiles against China.

We should not because that is probably the most expensive way to destroy the targets that would need to be destroyed and the way least consistent with the constraints we should observe, to wit, minimizing gratuitous population damage, minimizing the Soviet obligation to intervene, and minimizing postwar revulsion against the way we had fought the war.

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Furthermore, coercive warfare against Communist China, intended not to destroy the regime but to make the regime behave, would probably be aimed at Chinese military potency and objects of high value to the regime. The two least appropriate, or least effectual, weapons might be the two that people seem readiest to contemplate: conventional explosives and megaton warheads.

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What the United States was doing in North Vietnam in 1965 against a third-rate adversary, with conventional explosives carried by airplanes that were not designed for the purpose, it would probably attempt to do in China with low-yield nuclear weapons in airplanes that have not yet been designed for it.

We should probably want to destroy the Communist Chinese force with weapons that would cause no casualties beyond a half mile or so from the airfields; we should want to destroy industrial facilities that had a low population or labor-force density. We should want to destroy transport and communication facilities, military depots and training facilities, and troops themselves. We might not afford to do it with conventional weapons (unless newly effective conventional weapons were designed for it) and could not afford to cover such a target system with precious strategic missiles.

We need to recognize that China, as a “strategic” adversary, could not be taken care of by “strategic-war” planning that was developed during two decades of preoccupation with the Soviet Union. China is a different strategic problem altogether.

[…]

The need to distinguish a campaign intended to eliminate the regime from one intended only to coerce the regime into good behavior could become supremely important when the Chinese possess a nuclear retaliatory capability (against the United States or against any other population center that they might choose). Making clear to them that, however bad the war already was for them, it could become much, much worse, might be the most effective way to keep that capacity for nuclear mischief disarmed. At the same time, the most potent coercion might be a target strategy that threatened the regime—eventually, gradually, or uncertainly, not suddenly and decisively—and such a strategy would require discriminating what it is that the regime most treasures and where it is most vulnerable.

[…]

Forcible resistance to them outside their borders can never cost the Chinese more than the resources they knowingly put at risk, the troops and supplies they send abroad; but the bombing of North Vietnam is a mode of warfare that the record now shows to be a real possibility, one that the United States has not only thought of but engaged in. It is a mode of warfare that, at least with air supremacy and the absence of modern anti-aircraft weapons, can be conducted deliberately over a protracted period.

[…]

All of this does not mean expecting a war with China, any more than preoccupation with deterrent forces has meant settling for a war with the Soviet Union. It means making sure that if the point should be reached where a war with China were contemplated or forced on us, we would not fight a preposterously wrong kind of war for lack of having thought in advance about it or for lack of having equipped ourselves for a major adversary that differs drastically from the adversary that motivated our strategic weapons design for two decades.

[…]

A major attack on India could make all of this suddenly relevant, just as the Vietnamese war suddenly made relevant a concept of warfare that did not conform to the model of “limited war” that we inherited in Korea.

Thomas Schelling explains the manipulation of risk in Arms and Influence:

If all threats were fully believable (except for the ones that were completely un­believable) we might live in a strange world—perhaps a safe one, with many of the marks of a world based on enforceable law. Countries would hasten to set up their threats; and if the violence that would accompany infraction were confidently expected, and sufficiently dreadful to outweigh the fruits of transgression, the world might get frozen into a set of laws enforced by what we could figuratively call the Wrath of God. If we could threaten world inundation for any encroachment on the Berlin corridor, and everyone believed it and understood precisely what crime would bring about the deluge, it might not matter whether the whole thing were arranged by human or supernatural powers. If there were no uncertainty about what would and would not set off the violence, and if everyone could avoid accidentally overstepping the bounds, and if we and the Soviets (and everybody else) could avoid making simultaneous and incompatible threats, every nation would have to live within the rules set up by its adversary.

[…]

The unpredictability is not due solely to what a destroyer commander might do at midnight when he comes across a Soviet (or American) freighter at sea, but to the psychological process by which particular things become identified with courage or appeasement or how particular things get included in or left out of a diplomatic package. Whether the removal of their missiles from Cuba while leaving behind 15,000 troops is a “defeat” for the Soviets or a “defeat” for the United States depends more on how it is construed than on the military significance of the troops, and the construction placed on the outcome is not easily foreseeable.

The resulting international relations often have the character of a competition in risk taking, characterized not so much by tests of force as by tests of nerve. Particularly in the relations between major adversaries—between East and West—issues are decided not by who can bring the most force to bear in a locality, or on a particular issue, but by who is eventually willing to bring more force to bear or able to make it appear that more is forthcoming.

There are few clear choices—since the close of World War II there have been but a few clear choices—between war and peace. The actual decisions to engage in war—whether the Korean War that did occur or a war at Berlin or Quemoy or Lebanon that did not—were decisions to engage in a war of uncertain size, uncertain as to adversary, as to the weapons involved, even as to the issues that might be brought into it and the possible outcomes that might result. They were decisions to embark on a risky engagement, one that could develop a momentum of its own and get out of hand. Whether it is better to be red than dead is hardly worth arguing about; it is not a choice that has arisen for us or has seemed about to arise in the nuclear era. The questions that do arise involve degrees of risk—what risk is worth taking, and how to evaluate the risk in-volved in a course of action. The perils that countries face are not as straightforward as suicide, but more like Russian roulette. The fact of uncertainty—the sheer unpredictability of dangerous events—not only blurs things, it changes their character. It adds an entire dimension to military relations: the manipulation of risk.

There is just no foreseeable route by which the United States and the Soviet Union could become engaged in a major nuclear war. This does not mean that a major nuclear war cannot occur. It only means that if it occurs it will result from a process that is not entirely foreseen, from reactions that are not fully predictable, from decisions that are not wholly deliberate, from events that are not fully under control.

[…]

This does not mean that there is nothing the United States would fight a major war to defend, but that these are things that the Soviet Union would not fight a major war to obtain.

[…]

The picture is drawn of a Soviet attack, say, on Greece or Turkey or West Germany, and the question is raised, would the United States then launch a retaliatory blow against the Soviet Union? Some answer a disdainful no, some answer a proud yes, but neither seems to be answering the pertinent question. The choice is unlikely to be one between everything and nothing. The question is really: is the United States likely to do something that is fraught with the danger of war, something that could lead—through a compounding of actions and reactions, of calculations and miscalculations, of alarms and false alarms, of commitments and challenges—to a major war?

This is why deterrent threats are often so credible. They do not need to depend on a willingness to commit anything like suicide in the face of a challenge. A response that carries some risk of war can be plausible, even reasonable, at a time when a final, ultimate decision to have a general war would be implausible or unreasonable. A country can threaten to stumble into a war even if it cannot credibly threaten to invite one.

[…]

The idea, expressed by some writers, that such deterrence depends on a “credible first strike capability,” and that a country cannot plausibly threaten to engage in a general war over anything but a mortal assault on itself unless it has an appreciable capacity to blunt the other side’s attack, seems to depend on the clean-cut notion that war results—or is expected to result—only from a deliberate yes–no decision. But if war tends to result from a process, a dynamic process in which both sides get more and more deeply involved, more and more expectant, more and more concerned not to be a slow second in case the war starts, it is not a “credible first strike” that one threatens, but just plain war. The Soviet Union can indeed threaten us with war: they can even threaten us with a war that we eventually start, by threatening to get involved with us in a process that blows up into war. And some of the arguments about “superiority” and “inferiority” seem to imply that one of the two sides, being weaker, must absolutely fear war and concede while the other, being stronger, may confidently expect the other to yield. There is undoubtedly a good deal to the notion that the country with the less impressive military capability may be less feared, and the other may run the riskier course in a crisis; other things being equal, one anticipates that the strategically “superior” country has some advantage. But this is a far cry from the notion that the two sides just measure up to each other and one bows before the other’s superiority and acknowledges that he was only bluffing. Any situation that scares one side will scare both sides with the danger of a war that neither wants, and both will have to pick their way carefully through the crisis, never quite sure that the other knows how to avoid stumbling over the brink.

If “brinkmanship” means anything, it means manipulating the shared risk of war. It means exploiting the danger that somebody may inadvertently go over the brink, dragging the other with him. If two climbers are tied together, and one wants to intimidate the other by seeming about to fall over the edge, there has to be some uncertainty or anticipated irrationality or it won’t work. If the brink is clearly marked and provides a firm footing, no loose pebbles underfoot and no gusts of wind to catch one off guard, if each climber is in full control of himself and never gets dizzy, neither can pose any risk to the other by approaching the brink. There is no danger in approaching it; and while either can deliberately jump off, he cannot credibly pretend that he is about to. Any attempt to intimidate or to deter the other climber depends on the threat of slipping or stumbling. With loose ground, gusty winds, and a propensity toward dizziness, there is some danger when a climber approaches the edge; one can credibly threaten to fall off accidentally by standing near the brink.

Without uncertainty, deterrent threats of war would take the form of trip-wires. To incur commitment is to lay a trip-wire, one that is plainly visible, that cannot be stumbled on, and that is manifestly connected up to the machinery of war. And if effective, it works much like a physical barrier. The trip-wire will not be crossed as long as it has not been placed in an intolerable location, and it will not be placed in an intolerable location as long as there is no uncertainty about each other’s motives and nothing at issue that is worth a war to both sides. Either side can stick its neck out, confident that the other will not chop it off. As long as the process is a series of discrete steps, taken deliberately, without any uncertainty as to the consequences, this process of military commitment and maneuver would not lead to war. Imminent war—possible war—would be continually threatened, but the threats would work. They would work unless one side were pushed too far; but if the pushing side knows how far that is, it will not push that far.

[…]

Prohibitive penalties imposed on deliberate actions are equivalent to ordinary rules.

[…]

Skillful diplomacy, in the absence of uncertainty, consists in arranging things so that it is one’s opponent who is embarrassed by having the “last clear chance” to avert disaster by turning aside or abstaining from what he wanted to do.

[…]

In this way uncertainty imports tactics of intimidation into the game. One can incur a moderate probability of disaster, sharing it with his adversary, as a deterrent or compellent device, where one could not take, or persuasively threaten to take, a deliberate last clear step into certain disaster.

The route by which major war might actually be reached would have the same kind of unpredictability. Either side can take steps—engaging in a limited war would usually be such a step—that genuinely raise the probability of a blow-up. This would be the case with intrusions, blockades, occupations of third areas, border incidents, enlargement of some small war, or any incident that involves a challenge and entails a response that may in turn have to be risky. Many of these actions and threats designed to pressure and intimidate would be nothing but noise, if it were reliably known that the situation could not get out of hand. They would neither impose risk nor demonstrate willingness to incur risk. And if they definitely would lead to major war, they would not be taken. (If war were desired, it would be started directly.) What makes them significant and usable is that they create a genuine risk—a danger that can be appreciated—that the thing will blow up for reasons not fully under control.

It has often been said, and correctly, that a general nuclear war would not liberate Berlin and that local military action in the neighborhood of Berlin could be overcome by Soviet military forces. But that is not all there is to say. What local military forces can do, even against very superior forces, is to initiate this uncertain process of escalation. One does not have to be able to win a local military engagement to make the threat of it effective. Being able to lose a local war in a dangerous and provocative manner may make the risk—not the sure consequences, but the possibility of this act—outweigh the apparent gains to the other side.

[…]

The Soviet anticipation of the risks involved in a large-scale attack must include the danger that general war will result. If they underestimate the scale and duration of resistance and do attack, a purpose of resisting is to confront them, day after day, with an appreciation that life is risky, and that pursuit of the original objective is not worth the risk.

[…]

The credibility of a massive American response is often depreciated: even in the event of the threatened loss of Europe the United States would not, it is sometimes said, respond to the fait accompli of a Soviet attack on Europe with anything as “suicidal” as general war. But that is a simple-minded notion of what makes general war credible. What can make it exceedingly credible to the Russians—and perhaps to the Chinese in the Far East—is that the triggering of general war can occur whether we intend it or not.

[…]

However few the nuclears used, and however selectively they are used, their purpose should not be “tactical” because their consequences will not be tactical. With nuclears, it has become more than ever a war of risks and threats at the highest strategic level. It is a war of nuclear bargaining.

There are some inferences for NATO planning. First, nuclear weapons should not be evaluated mainly in terms of what they could do on the battlefield: the decision to introduce them, the way to use them, the targets to use them on, the scale on which to use them, the timing with which to use them, and the communications to accompany their use should not be determined (or not mainly determined) by how they affect the tactical course of the local war. Much more important is what they do to the expectation of general war, and what rules or patterns of expectations about local use are created.

[…]

Second, as a corollary we should not think that the value or likely success of NATO armed forces depends solely, or even mainly, on whether they can win a local war. Particularly if nuclears are introduced, the war may never run its course. Even without the introduction of nuclears, a main function of resistance forces is to create and prolong a genuine sense of danger, of the potentiality of general war. This is not a danger that we create for the Russians and avoid ourselves; it is a danger we share with them. But it is this deterrent and intimidation function that deserves at least as much attention as the tactical military potentialities of the troops.

Third, forces that might seem to be quite “inadequate” by ordinary tactical standards can serve a purpose, particularly if they can threaten to keep the situation in turmoil for some period of time. The important thing is to preclude a quick, clean Soviet victory that quiets things down in short order.

Fourth, the deployment and equipment of nuclear-armed NATO troops, including the questions of which nationalities have nuclear weapons and which services have them, are affected by the purpose and function and character of nuclear and local war. If what is required is a skillful and well-controlled bargaining use of nuclears in the event the decision is taken to go above that threshold, and if the main purpose of nuclears is not to help the troops on the battlefield, it is much less necessary to decentralize nuclear weapons and decisions to local commanders. The strategy will need tight centralized control; it may not require the kind of close battlefield support that is often taken to justify distribution of small nuclears to the troops; and nuclears probably could be reserved to some special nuclear forces.

Fifth, if the main consequence of nuclear weapons, and the purpose of introducing them, is to create and signal a heightened risk of general war, our plans should reflect that purpose.

[…]

Targets should be picked with a view to what the Soviet leadership perceives about the character of the war and about our intent, not for tactical importance. A target near or inside the U.S.S.R., for example, is important because it is near or inside the U.S.S.R., not because of its tactical contribution to the European battlefield.

[…]

The Soviets must be persuaded that the war is getting out of hand but is not yet beyond the point of no return.

Sixth, we have to expect the Soviets to pursue their own policy of exploiting the risk of war. We cannot expect the Soviets to acquiesce in our unilateral nuclear demonstration. We have to be prepared to interpret and to respond to a Soviet nuclear “counterproposal.” Finding a way to terminate will be as important as choosing how to initiate such an exchange. (We should not take wholly for granted that the initiation would be ours.)

[…]

It is not necessarily prudent to wait until the last desperate moment in a losing engagement to introduce nuclear weapons as a last resort. By the time they are desperately needed to prevent a debacle, it may be too late to use them carefully, discriminatingly, with a view to the message that is communicated, and with the maintenance of adequate control.

[…]

In its extreme form the restrained, signaling, intimidating use of nuclears for brinkmanship has sometimes been called the “shot across the bow.” There is always a danger—Churchill and others have warned against it—of making a bold demonstration on so small a scale that the contrary of boldness is demonstrated. There is no cheap, safe way of using nuclears that scares the wits out of the Russians without scaring us too. Nevertheless, any use of nuclears is going to change the pattern of expectations about the war. It is going to rip a tradition of inhibition on their use. It is going to change everyone’s expectations about the future use of nuclears. Even those who have argued that nuclears ought to be considered just a more efficient kind of artillery will surely catch their breath when the first one goes off in anger.

[…]

It is sometimes argued, quite correctly, that this tradition can be eroded, and the danger of “first use” reduced, by introducing nuclear weapons in some “safe” fashion, gradually getting the world used to nuclear weapons and dissipating the drama of nuclear explosions. Nuclear depth charges at sea, small nuclear warheads in air-to-air combat, or nuclear demolitions on defended soil may seem comparatively free of the danger of unlimited escalation, cause no more civil disruption than TNT, appear responsible, and set new traditions for actual use, including the tradition that nuclear weapons can be used without signaling all-out war.

[…]

The earliest instance [of the game of chicken] I have come across, in a race with horse-drawn vehicles, antedates the auto by some time:

The road here led through a gully, and in one part the winter flood had broken down part of the road and made a hol-low. Menelaos was driving in the middle of the road, hoping that no one would try to pass too close to his wheel, but Antilochos turned his horses out of the track and followed him a little to one side. This frightened Menelaos, and he shouted at him:

“What reckless driving Antilochos! Hold in your horses. This place is narrow, soon you will have more room to pass. You will foul my car and destroy us both!”

But Antilochos only plied the whip and drove faster than ever, as if he did not hear. They raced about as far as the cast of quoit . . . and then [Menelaos] fell behind: he let the horses go slow himself, for he was afraid that they might all collide in that narrow space and overturn the cars and fall in a struggling heap.

This game of chicken took place outside the gates of Troy three thousand years ago. Antilochos won, though Homer says—somewhat ungenerously—“ by trick, not by merit.”

[…]

These various games of chicken—the genuine ones that involve some real unpredictability—have some characteristics that are worth noting. One is that, unlike those sociable games it takes two to play, with chicken it takes two not to play. If you are publicly invited to play chicken and say you would rather not, you have just played.

Second, what is in dispute is usually not the issue of the moment, but everyone’s expectations about how a participant will behave in the future. To yield may be to signal that one can be expected to yield; to yield often or continually indicates acknowledgment that is one’s role. To yield repeatedly up to some limit and then to say “enough” may guarantee that the first show of obduracy loses the game for both sides. If you can get a reputation for being reckless, demanding, or unreliable—and apparently hot-rods, taxis, and cars with “driving school” license plates sometimes enjoy this advantage—you may find concessions made to you. (The driver of a wide American car on a narrow European street is at less of a disadvantage than a static calculation would indicate. The smaller cars squeeze over to give him room.) Between these extremes, one can get a reputation for being firm in demanding an appropriate share of the road but not aggressively challenging about the other’s half. Unfortunately, in less stylized games than the highway version, it is often hard to know just where the central or fair or expected division should lie, or even whether there should be any recognition of one contestant’s claim.

[…]

When two rivals are coaxed by their friends to have it out in a fight, they may manage to shrug it off skillfully, but only if neither comes away looking exclusively responsible for turning down the opportunity. Both players can appreciate a rule that forbids play; if the cops break up the game before it starts, so that nobody plays and nobody is proved chicken, many and perhaps all of the players will consider it a great night, especially if their ultimate willingness to play was not doubted.

In fact, one of the great advantages of international law and custom, or an acknowledged code of ethics, is that a country may be obliged not to engage in some dangerous rivalry when it would actually prefer not to but might otherwise feel obliged to for the sake of its bargaining reputation. The boy who wears glasses and can’t see without them cannot fight if he wants to; but if he wants to avoid the fight it is not so obviously for lack of nerve. (Equally good, if he’d prefer not to fight but might feel obliged to, is to have an adversary who wears glasses. Both can hope that at least one of them is honorably precluded from joining the issue.) One of the values of laws, conventions, or traditions that restrain participation in games of nerve is that they provide a graceful way out.

[…]

It is often argued that “face” is a frivolous asset to preserve, and that it is a sign of immaturity that a government can’t swallow its pride and lose face. It is undoubtedly true that false pride often tempts a government’s officials to take irrational risks or to do undignified things—to bully some small country that insults them, for example. But there is also the more serious kind of “face,” the kind that in modern jargon is known as a country’s “image,” consisting of other countries’ beliefs (their leaders’ beliefs, that is) about how the country can be expected to behave. It relates not to a country’s “worth” or “status” or even “honor,” but to its reputation for action. If the question is raised whether this kind of “face” is worth fighting over, the answer is that this kind of face is one of the few things worth fighting over. Few parts of the world are intrinsically worth the risk of serious war by themselves, especially when taken slice by slice, but defending them or running risks to protect them may preserve one’s commitments to action in other parts of the world and at later times. “Face” is merely the interdependence of a country’s commitments; it is a country’s reputation for action, the expectations other countries have about its behavior. We lost thirty thousand dead in Korea to save face for the United States and the United Nations, not to save South Korea for the South Koreans, and it was undoubtedly worth it. Soviet expectations about the behavior of the United States are one of the most valuable assets we possess in world affairs.

[…]

It is often argued that “face” is a frivolous asset to preserve, and that it is a sign of immaturity that a government can’t swallow its pride and lose face. It is undoubtedly true that false pride often tempts a government’s officials to take irrational risks or to do undignified things—to bully some small country that insults them, for example. But there is also the more serious kind of “face,” the kind that in modern jargon is known as a country’s “image,” consisting of other countries’ beliefs (their leaders’ beliefs, that is) about how the country can be expected to behave. It relates not to a country’s “worth” or “status” or even “honor,” but to its reputation for action. If the question is raised whether this kind of “face” is worth fighting over, the answer is that this kind of face is one of the few things worth fighting over. Few parts of the world are intrinsically worth the risk of serious war by themselves, especially when taken slice by slice, but defending them or running risks to protect them may preserve one’s commitments to action in other parts of the world and at later times. “Face” is merely the interdependence of a country’s commitments; it is a country’s reputation for action, the expectations other countries have about its behavior. We lost thirty thousand dead in Korea to save face for the United States and the United Nations, not to save South Korea for the South Koreans, and it was undoubtedly worth it. Soviet expectations about the behavior of the United States are one of the most valuable assets we possess in world affairs.

Thomas Schelling explains the art of commitment in Arms and Influence:

No one seems to doubt that federal troops are available to defend California. I have, however, heard Frenchmen doubt whether American troops can be counted on to defend France, or American missiles to blast Russia in case France is attacked.

[…]

It is a tradition in military planning to attend to an enemy’s capabilities, not his intentions. But deterrence is about intentions—not just estimating enemy intentions but influencing them. The hardest part is communicating our own intentions.

[…]

Nations have been known to bluff; they have also been known to make threats sincerely and change their minds when the chips were down.

[…]

When Churchill said that the British would fight on the beaches nobody supposed that he had sat up all night running once more through the calculations to make sure that was the right policy. Declaring war against Germany for the attack on Poland, though, was a different kind of decision, not a simple reflex but a matter of “policy.” Some threats are inherently persuasive, some have to be made persuasive, and some are bound to look like bluffs.

[…]

As a tentative approximation—a very tentative one—the difference between the national homeland and everything “abroad” is the difference between threats that are inherently credible, even if unspoken, and the threats that have to be made credible.

[…]

It is a paradox of deterrence that in threatening to hurt somebody if he misbehaves, it need not make a critical difference how much it would hurt you too—if you can make him believe the threat. People walk against traffic lights on busy streets, deterring trucks by walking in front of them.

[…]

Another paradox of deterrence is that it does not always help to be, or to be believed to be, fully rational, cool-headed, and in control of oneself or of one’s country. One of Joseph Conrad’s books, The Secret Agent, concerns a group of anarchists in London who were trying to destroy bourgeois society. One of their techniques was bomb explosions; Greenwich Observatory was the objective in this book. They got their nitroglycerin from a stunted little chemist. The authorities knew where they got their stuff and who made it for them. But this little purveyor of nitroglycerin walked safely past the London police. A young man who was tied in with the job at Greenwich asked him why the police did not capture him. His answer was that they would not shoot him from a distance—that would be a denial of bourgeois morality, and serve the anarchists’ cause—and they dared not capture him physically because he always kept some “stuff” on his person. He kept a hand in his pocket, he said, holding a ball at the end of a tube that reached a container of nitroglycerin in his jacket pocket. All he had to do was to press that little ball and anybody within his immediate neighborhood would be blown to bits with him. His young companion wondered why the police would believe anything so preposterous as that the chemist would actually blow himself up. The little man’s explanation was calm. “In the last instance it is character alone that makes for one’s safety . . . I have the means to make myself deadly, but that by itself, you understand, is absolutely nothing in the way of protection. What is effective is the belief those people have in my will to use the means. That’s their impression. It is absolute. Therefore I am deadly.”

[…]

I have been told that in mental institutions there are inmates who are either very crazy or very wise, or both, who make clear to the attendants that they may slit their own veins or light their clothes on fire if they don’t have their way. I understand that they sometimes have their way.

Recall the trouble we had persuading Mossadegh in the early 1950s that he might do his country irreparable damage if he did not become more reasonable with respect to his country and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Threats did not get through to him very well. He wore pajamas, and, according to reports, he wept. And when British or American diplomats tried to explain what would happen to his country if he continued to be obstinate, and why the West would not bail him out of his difficulties, it was apparently uncertain whether he even comprehended what was being said to him. It must have been a little like trying to persuade a new puppy that you will beat him to death if he wets on the floor. If he cannot hear you, or cannot understand you, or cannot control himself, the threat cannot work and you very likely will not even make it.

[…]

There have been serious suggestions that nuclear weapons should be put directly at the disposal of German troops, on the grounds that the Germans would be less reluctant to use them—and that Soviet leaders know they would be less reluctant—than their American colleagues in the early stages of war or ambiguous aggression. And in part, the motive behind the proposals that authority to use nuclear weapons be delegated in peacetime to theater commanders or even lower levels of command, as in the presidential campaign of 1964, is to substitute military boldness for civilian hesitancy in a crisis or at least to make it look that way to the enemy. Sending a high-ranking military officer to Berlin, Quemoy, or Saigon in a crisis carries a suggestion that authority has been delegated to someone beyond the reach of political inhibition and bureaucratic delays, or even of presidential responsibility, someone whose personal reactions will be in a bold military tradition. The intense dissatisfaction of many senators with President Kennedy’s restraint over Cuba in early 1962, and with the way matters were left at the close of the crisis in that November, though in many ways an embarrassment to the President, may nevertheless have helped to convey to the Cubans and to the Soviets that, however peaceable the President might want to be, there were political limits to his patience.

[…]

“If you send in tanks, they will burn and make no mistake about it. If you want war, you can have it, but remember it will be your war. Our rockets will fly automatically.” At this point, according to Harriman, Khrushchev’s colleagues around the table chorused the word “automatically.”

[…]

General Pierre Gallois, an outstanding French critic of American military policy, has credited Khrushchev with a “shrewd understanding of the politics of deterrence,” evidenced by this “irrational outburst” in the presence of Secretary Harriman.

[…]

We ought to get something a little less idiosyncratic for 50 billion dollars a year of defense expenditure. A government that is obliged to appear responsible in its foreign policy can hardly cultivate forever the appearance of impetuosity on the most important decisions in its care.

[…]

President Kennedy chose a most impressive occasion for his declaration on “automaticity.” It was his address of October 22, 1962, launching the Cuban crisis. In an unusually deliberate and solemn statement he said, “Third: it shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” Coming less than six months after Secretary McNamara’s official elucidation of the strategy of controlled and flexible response, the reaction implied in the President’s statement would have been not only irrational but probably—depending on just what “full retaliatory response” meant to the President or to the Russians—inconsistent with one of the foundations of the President’s own military policy, a foundation that was laid as early as his first defense budget message of 1961, which stressed the importance of proportioning the response to the provocation, even in war itself.

[…]

As a matter of fact it is most unlikely—actually it is inconceivable—that in preparing his address the President sent word to senior military and civilian officials that this particular paragraph of his speech was not to be construed as policy.

[…]

Often we must maneuver into a position where we no longer have much choice left. This is the old business of burning bridges. If you are faced with an enemy who thinks you would turn and run if he kept advancing, and if the bridge is there to run across, he may keep advancing. He may advance to the point where, if you do not run, a clash is automatic. Calculating what is in your long-run interest, you may turn and cross the bridge. At least, he may expect you to. But if you burn the bridge so that you cannot retreat, and in sheer desperation there is nothing you can do but defend yourself, he has a new calculation to make. He cannot count on what you would prefer to do if he were advancing irresistibly; he must decide instead what he ought to do if you were incapable of anything but resisting him.

This is the position that Chiang Kai-shek got himself into, and us with him, when he moved a large portion of his best troops to Quemoy. Evacuation under fire would be exceedingly difficult; if attacked, his troops had no choice but to fight, and we probably had no choice but to assist them. It was undoubtedly a shrewd move from Chiang’s point of view—coupling himself, and the United States with him, to Quemoy—and in fact if we had wanted to make clear to the Chinese Communists that Quemoy had to be defended if they attacked it, it would even have been a shrewd move also from our point of view.

This idea of burning bridges—of maneuvering into a position where one clearly cannot yield—conflicts somewhat, at least semantically, with the notion that what we want in our foreign policy is “the initiative.” Initiative is good if it means imaginativeness, boldness, new ideas. But the term somewhat disguises the fact that deterrence, particularly deterrence of anything less than mortal assault on the United States, often depends on getting into a position where the initiative is up to the enemy and it is he who has to make the awful decision to proceed to a clash.

In recent years it has become something of a principle in the Department of Defense that the country should have abundant “options” in its choice of response to enemy moves. The principle is a good one, but so is a contrary principle—that certain options are an embarrassment. The United States government goes to great lengths to reassure allies and to warn Russians that it has eschewed certain options altogether, or to demonstrate that it could not afford them or has placed them out of reach. The commitment process on which all American overseas deterrence depends—and on which all confidence within the alliance depends—is a process of surrendering and destroying options that we might have been expected to find too attractive in an emergency. We not only give them up in exchange for commitments to us by our allies; we give them up on our own account to make our intentions clear to potential enemies. In fact, we do it not just to display our intentions but to adopt those intentions. If deterrence fails it is usually because someone thought he saw an “option” that the American government had failed to dispose of, a loophole that it hadn’t closed against itself.

At law there is a doctrine of the “last clear chance.” It recognizes that, in the events leading up to an accident, there was some point prior to which either party could avert collision, some point after which neither could, and very likely a period between when one party could still control events but the other was helpless to turn aside or stop. The one that had the “last clear chance” to avert collision is held responsible. In strategy when both parties abhor collision the advantage goes often to the one who arranges the status quo in his favor and leaves to the other the “last clear chance” to stop or turn aside. Xenophon understood the principle when, threatened by an attack he had not sought, he placed his Greeks with their backs against an impassable ravine. “I should like the enemy to think it is easy-going in every direction for him to retreat.” And when he had to charge a hill occupied by aliens, he “did not attack from every direction but left the enemy a way of escape, if he wanted to run away.” The “last chance” to clear out was left to the enemy when Xenophon had to take the initiative, but denied to himself when he wanted to deter attack, leaving his enemy the choice to attack or retire.

[…]

It was typically agreed, especially at summit meetings, that nobody wanted a war. Khrushchev’s complacent remark, based on Berlin’s being on his side of the border, was that Berlin was not worth a war. As the story goes, he was reminded that Berlin was not worth a war to him either. “No,” he replied, “but you are the ones that have to cross a frontier.” The implication, I take it, was that neither of us wanted to cross that threshold just for Berlin, and if Berlin’s location makes us the ones who have to cross the border, we are the ones who let it go though both of us are similarly fearful of war.

[…]

To have told the Soviets in the late 1940s that, if they attacked, we were obliged to defend Europe might not have been wholly convincing. When the Administration asked Congress for authority to station Army divisions in Europe in peacetime, the argument was explicitly made that these troops were there not to defend against a superior Soviet army but to leave the Soviet Union in no doubt that the United States would be automatically involved in the event of any attack on Europe. The implicit argument was not that since we obviously would defend Europe we should demonstrate the fact by putting troops there. The reasoning was probably that, whether we wished to be or not, we could not fail to be involved if we had more troops being run over by the Soviet Army than we could afford to see defeated. Notions like “trip wire” or “plate glass window,” though oversimplified, were attempts to express this role. And while “trip wire” is a belittling term to describe an army, the role is not a demeaning one. The garrison in Berlin is as fine a collection of soldiers as has ever been assembled, but excruciatingly small. What can 7,000 American troops do, or 12,000 Allied troops? Bluntly, they can die. They can die heroically, dramatically, and in a manner that guarantees that the action cannot stop there. They represent the pride, the honor, and the reputation of the United States government and its armed forces; and they can apparently hold the entire Red Army at bay. Precisely because there is no graceful way out if we wished our troops to yield ground, and because West Berlin is too small an area in which to ignore small encroachments, West Berlin and its military forces constitute one of the most impregnable military outposts of modern times. The Soviets have not dared to cross that frontier.

Berlin illustrates two common characteristics of these commitments. The first is that if the commitment is ill defined and ambiguous—if we leave ourselves loopholes through which to exit—our opponent will expect us to be under strong temptation to make a graceful exit (or even a somewhat graceless one) and he may be right. The western sector of Berlin is a tightly defined piece of earth, physically occupied by Western troops: our commitment is credible because it is inescapable.

[…]

The second thing that Berlin illustrates is that, however precisely defined is the issue about which we are committed, it is often uncertain just what we are committed to do. The commitment is open-ended. Our military reaction to an assault on West Berlin is really not specified. We are apparently committed to holding the western sector of the city if we can; if we are pushed back, we are presumably committed to repelling the intruders and restoring the original boundary. If we lose the city, we are perhaps committed to reconquering it. But somewhere in this sequence of events things get out of hand, and the matter ceases to be purely one of restoring the status quo in Berlin. Military instabilities may arise that make the earlier status quo meaningless. A costly reestablishment of the status quo might call for some sort of reprisal, obliging some counteraction in return. Just what would happen is a matter of prediction, or guess. What we seem to be committed to is action of some sort commensurate with the provocation. Military resistance tends to develop a momentum of its own. It is dynamic and uncertain. What we threaten in Berlin is to initiate a process that may quickly get out of hand.

The maneuver in Lebanon in 1958—the landing of troops in a developing crisis—though not one of the neatest political–military operations of recent times, represented a similar strategy. Whatever the military potential of the ten or twelve thousand troops that we landed in Lebanon—and it would depend on who might have engaged them, where, over what issue—they had the advantage that they got on the ground before any Soviet adventure or movement was under way. The landing might be described as a “preemptive maneuver.” From then on, any significant Soviet intervention in the affairs of Lebanon, Jordan, or even Iraq, would have substantially raised the likelihood that American and Soviet forces, or American and Soviet-supported forces, would be directly engaged.

In effect, it was Khrushchev’s turn to cross a border. Iraq or Jordan might not have been worth a war to either of us but by getting troops on the soil—or, as we used to say, the American flag—we probably made it clear to the Kremlin that we could not gracefully retreat under duress. It is harder to retreat than not to land in the first place; the landing helped to put the next step up to the Russians.

In addition to getting yourself where you cannot retreat, there is a more common way of making a threat. That is to incur a political involvement, to get a nation’s honor, obligation, and diplomatic reputation committed to a response. The Formosa resolution of 1955, along with the military assistance agreement then signed by the United States and the National Government of the Republic of China, should probably be interpreted that way. It was not mainly a technique for reassuring Chiang Kai-shek that we would defend him, and it was not mainly a quid pro quo for something he did for us. It was chiefly important as a move to impress a third party. The primary audience for the congressional action was inside the Soviet bloc. The resolution, together with the treaty, was a ceremony to leave the Chinese and the Russians under no doubt that we could not back down from the defense of Formosa without intolerable loss of prestige, reputation, and leadership. We were not merely communicating an intention or obligation we already had, but actually enhancing the obligation in the process. The congressional message was not, “Since we are obliged to defend Formosa, we may as well show it.” Rather: “In case we were not sufficiently committed to impress you, now we are. We hereby oblige ourselves. Behold us in the public ritual of getting ourselves genuinely committed.”

That kind of commitment is not to be had cheaply. If Congress passed such a resolution for every small piece of the world that it would like the Soviets to leave alone, it would cheapen the currency. A nation has limited resources, so to speak, in the things that it can get exceptionally concerned about. Political involvement within a country is not something that can be had for the price of a casual vote or a signature on a piece of paper.

[…]

One of the lessons of November 1962 may be that, in the face of anything quite as adventuresome as an effort to take over a country the size of India, we may be virtually as committed as if we had a mutual assistance treaty. We cannot afford to let the Soviets or Communist Chinese learn by experience that they can grab large chunks of the earth and its population without a genuine risk of violent Western reaction.

Our commitment to Quemoy, which gave us concern in 1955 and especially in 1958, had not been deliberately conceived; and it appeared at the time to be a genuine embarrassment. For reasons that had nothing to do with American policy, Quemoy had been successfully defended by the Nationalists when Chiang Kai-shek evacuated the mainland, and it remained in Nationalist hands. By the time the United States assumed the Commitment to Formosa, the island of Quemoy stood as a ragged edge about which our intentions were ambiguous. Secretary Dulles in 1958 expressed the official view that we could not afford to vacate Quemoy under duress. The implication seemed to be that we had no genuine desire to take risks for Quemoy and might have preferred it if Quemoy had fallen to the Communists in 1949; but our relations with Communist China were at stake once Quemoy became an issue. So we had a commitment that we might have preferred not to have. And in case that commitment did not appear firm enough, Chiang Kai-shek increased it for us by moving enough of his best troops to that island, under conditions in which evacuation under attack would have been difficult, to make clear that he had to defend it or suffer military disaster, leaving it up to the United States to bail him out.

[…]

We cannot afford to let the Soviets overrun West Germany or Greece, irrespective of our treaty commitments to Germany or to the rest of Western Europe.

[…]

It is interesting that any “commitment” we had to keep India from being conquered or destroyed by Communist China was not mainly a commitment to the Indians or their government. We wanted to restrain Communist China generally; we wanted to give confidence to other governments in Asia; and we wanted to preserve confidence in our deterrent role all the way around the world to Europe. Military support to India would be a way of keeping an implicit pledge but the pledge was a general one, not a debt owed to the Indians. When a disciplinarian—police or other—intervenes to resist or punish someone’s forbidden intrusion or assault, any benefit to the victim of the intrusion or assault may be incidental. He could even prefer not to be fought over; but if the issue is maintenance of discipline, he may not have much say in the matter.

[…]

There has been a lot of discussion about whether we were or were not “committed” to the defense of South Korea. From what I have seen of the way the decision to intervene was taken, first by participation of American military assistance forces, then by bombing, then with reinforcements, and finally with a major war effort, one could not confidently have guessed in May 1950 what the United States would do.

[…]

And we seem to have misread the Chinese warnings during our advance toward the Yalu River. Allen Whiting has documented a serious Chinese Communist attempt to warn the Americans that they would engage us militarily rather than let us occupy all of North Korea.

[…]

The reason we got committed to the defense of Berlin, and stayed committed, is that if we let the Soviets scare us out of Berlin we would lose face with the Soviets themselves. The reputation that most matters to us is our reputation with the Soviet (and Communist Chinese) leaders. It would be bad enough to have Europeans, Latin Americans, or Asians think that we are immoral or cowardly. It would be far worse to lose our reputation with the Soviets. When we talk about the loss of face that would occur if we backed out of Formosa under duress, or out of Berlin, the loss of face that matters most is the loss of Soviet belief that we will do, elsewhere and subsequently, what we insist we will do here and now. Our deterrence rests on Soviet expectations.

[…]

There is an interesting geographical difference in the Soviet and American homelands; it is hard to imagine a war so located that it could spill over by hot pursuit, by interdiction bombing, by inadvertent border violation, by local reprisal bombing, or even by deliberate but limited ground encroachment into American territory. Our oceans may not protect us from big wars but they protect us from little ones. A local war could not impinge on California, involving it peripherally or incidentally through geographical continuity, the way the Korean War could impinge on Manchuria and Siberia, or the way Soviet territory could be impinged on by war in Iran, Yugoslavia, or Central Europe. One can argue about how far back toward Moscow an “interdiction campaign” of bombing might have to reach, or might safely reach, in case of a limited war in Central Europe; and there is no geographical feature—and few economic features—to present a sudden discontinuity at the Soviet border. A comparable question hardly arises for American participation in the same war; there is one discontinuity leading to submarine warfare on the high seas, and another, a great one, in going inland to the railroad tracks that carry the freight to the Baltimore docks. The vehicles or vessels that would have to carry out the intrusion would furthermore be different in character from those involved in the “theater war.”

[…]

One of the arguments that has been made, and taken seriously, against having all of our strategic weapons at sea or in outer space or even emplaced abroad, is that the enemy might be able to attack them without fearing the kind of response that would be triggered by an attack on our homeland. If all missiles were on ships at sea, the argument runs, an attack on a ship would not be quite the same as an attack on California or Massachusetts; and an enemy might consider doing it in circumstances when he would not consider attacking weapons located on our soil. (An extreme form of the argument, not put forward quite so seriously, was that we ought to locate our weapons in the middle of population centers, so that the enemy could never attack them without arousing the massive response that he could take for granted if he struck our cities.)

There is something to the argument. If in an Asian war we flew bombers from aircraft carriers or from bases in an allied country, and an enemy attacked our ships at sea or our overseas bases, we would almost certainly not consider it the same as if we had flown the bombers from bases in Hawaii or California and he had attacked the bases in those states. If the Soviets had put nuclear weapons in orbit and we shot at them with rockets the results might be serious, but not the same as if the Soviets had put missiles on home territory and we shot at those missiles on their home grounds.

[…]

(One of the arguments made against the use of surface ships in a European Multilateral Force armed with long-range missiles was that they could be picked off by an enemy, possibly during a limited war in which the Multilateral Force was not engaged, possibly without the use of nuclear weapons by an enemy, in a way that would not quite provoke reprisal, and thus would be vulnerable in a way that homeland-based missiles would not be.)

The argument can go either way. This can be a reason for deliberately putting weapons outside our boundary, so that their military involvement would not tempt an attack on our homeland, or for keeping them within our boundaries so that an attack on them would appear the more risky.

[…]

And I have heard it argued that the Soviets, if they fear for the deterrent security of their retaliatory forces in a purely “military” war that the Americans might initiate, may actually prefer a close proximity of their missiles to their cities to make the prospect of a “clean” strategic war, one without massive attacks on cities, less promising—to demonstrate that there would remain little to lose, after an attack on their weapons, and little motive to confine their response to military targets. The policy would be a dangerous one if there were much likelihood that war would occur, but its logic has merit.

[…]

If we always treat China as though it is a Soviet California, we tend to make it so. If we imply to the Soviets that we consider Communist China or Czechoslovakia the virtual equivalent of Siberia, then in the event of any military action in or against those areas we have informed the Soviets that we are going to interpret their response as though we had landed troops in Vladivostok or Archangel or launched them across the Soviet-Polish border. We thus oblige them to react in China, or in North Vietnam or wherever it may be, and in effect give them precisely the commitment that is worth so much to them in deterring the West. If we make it clear that we believe they are obliged to react to an intrusion in Hungary as though we were in the streets of Moscow, then they are obliged.

]…]

Certain things like honor and outrage are not meant to be matters of degree. One can say that his homeland is inviolate only if he knows exactly what he means by “homeland” and it is not cluttered up with full-fledged states, protectorates, territories, and gradations of citizenship that make some places more “homeland” than others. Like virginity, the homeland wants an absolute definition.

[…]

We came at last to treat the Sino-Soviet split as a real one; but it would have been wiser not to have acknowledged their fusion in the first place. In our efforts to dramatize and magnify the Soviet threat, we sometimes present the Soviet Union with a deterrent asset of a kind that we find hard to create for ourselves.

[…]

Sometimes a country wants to get out of a commitment—to decouple itself. It is not easy. We may have regretted our commitment to Quemoy in 1958, but there was no graceful way to undo it at that time. The Berlin wall was a genuine embarrassment. We apparently had not enough of a commitment to feel obliged to use violence against the Berlin wall. We had undeniably some commitment; there was some expectation that we might take action and some belief that we ought to. We did not, and it cost us something. If nobody had ever expected us to do anything about the wall—if we had never appeared to have any obligation to prevent things like the wall, and if we had never made any claims about East Berlin that seemed inconsistent with the wall—the wall would have embarrassed us less.

[…]

The Soviets had a similar problem over Cuba. Less than six weeks before the President’s missile crisis address of October 22, 1962, the Soviet government had issued a formal statement about Cuba. “We have said and do repeat that if war is unleashed, if the aggressor makes an attack on one state or another and this state asks for assistance, the Soviet Union has the possibility from its own territory to render assistance to any peace-loving state and not only to Cuba. And let no one doubt that the Soviet Union will render such assistance.” And further, “The Soviet government would like to draw attention to the fact that one cannot now attack Cuba and expect that the aggressor will be free from punishment for this attack. If this attack is made, this will be the beginning of the unleashing of war.” It was a long, argumentative statement, however, and acknowledged that “only a madman can think now that a war started by him will be a calamity only for the people against which it is unleashed.” And the most threatening language was not singled out for solemn treatment but went along as part of the argument. So there was at least a degree of ambiguity.

President Kennedy’s television broadcast of October 22 was directly aimed at the Soviet Union. It was so directly aimed that one can infer only a conscious decision to make this not a Caribbean affair but an East–West affair. It concerned Soviet missiles and Soviet duplicity, a Soviet challenge; and the President even went out of his way to express concern for the Cubans, his desire that they not be hurt, and his regret for the “foreign domination” that was responsible for their predicament. The President did not say that we had a problem with Cuba and hoped the Soviets would keep out of it; he said we had an altercation with the Soviet Union and hoped Cubans would not be hurt.

[…]

But just as one cannot incur a genuine commitment by purely verbal means, one cannot get out of it with cheap words either. Secretary Dulles in 1958 could not have said, “Quemoy? Who cares about Quemoy? It’s not worth fighting over, and our defense perimeter will be neater without it.” The United States never did talk its way cleanly out of the Berlin wall business. Even if the letter of our obligations was never violated, there are bound to be some who think the spirit demanded more. We had little obligation to intervene in Hungary in 1956, and the Suez crisis confused and screened it. Nevertheless, there was a possibility that the West might do something and it did not. Maybe this was a convenience, clarifying an implicit understanding between East and West. But the cost was not zero.

If commitments could be undone by declaration they would be worthless in the first place. The whole purpose of verbal or ritualistic commitments, of political and diplomatic commitments, of efforts to attach honor and reputation to a commitment, is to make the commitment manifestly hard to get out of on short notice. Even the commitments not deliberately incurred, and the commitments that embarrass one in unforeseen circumstances, cannot be undone cheaply. The cost is the discrediting of other commitments that one would still like to be credited.

[…]

The Chinese Communists seemed not to be trying, from 1958 on, to make it easy for the United States to decouple itself from Quemoy. They maintained, and occasionally intensified, enough military pressure on the island to make graceful withdrawal difficult, to make withdrawal look like retreat under duress. It is hard to escape the judgment that they enjoyed American discomfort over Quemoy, their own ability to stir things up at will but to keep crises under their control, and their opportunity to aggravate American differences with Chiang Kai-shek.

“Salami tactics,” we can be sure, were invented by a child; whoever first expounded the adult version had already understood the principle when he was small. 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, wondering whatever happened to all our discipline.

[…]

No matter how inviolate our commitment to some border, we are unlikely to start a war the first time a few drunken soldiers from the other side wander across the line and “invade” our territory. And there is always the possibility that some East German functionary on the Autobahn really did not get the word, or his vehicle really did break down in our lane of traffic. There is some threshold below which the commitment is just not operative, and even that threshold itself is usually unclear.

From this arises the low-level incident or probe, and tactics of erosion. One tests the seriousness of a commitment by probing it in a noncommittal way, pretending the trespass was inadvertent or unauthorized if one meets resistance, both to forestall the reaction and to avoid backing down. One stops a convoy or overflies a border, pretending the incident was accidental or unauthorized; but if there is no challenge, one continues or enlarges the operation, setting a precedent, establishing rights of thoroughfare or squatters’ rights, pushing the commitment back or raising the threshold. The use of “volunteers” by Soviet countries to intervene in trouble spots was usually an effort to sneak under the fence rather than climb over it, not quite invoking the commitment, but simultaneously making the commitment appear porous and infirm. And if there is no sharp qualitative division between a minor transgression and a major affront, but a continuous gradation of activity, one can begin his intrusion on a scale too small to provoke a reaction, and increase it by imperceptible degrees, never quite presenting a sudden, dramatic challenge that would invoke the committed response. Small violations of a truce agreement, for example, become larger and larger, and the day never comes when the camel’s back breaks under a single straw.

[…]

If the committed country has a reputation for sometimes, unpredictably, reacting where it need not, and not always collaborating to minimize embarrassment, loopholes may be less inviting. If one cannot get a reputation for always honoring commitments in detail, because the details are ambiguous, it may help to get a reputation for being occasionally unreasonable. If one cannot buy clearly identifiable and fully reliable trip-wires, an occasional booby trap placed at random may serve somewhat the same purpose in the long run.

Landlords rarely evict tenants by strong-arm methods. They have learned that steady cumulative pressures work just as well, though more slowly, and avoid provoking a violent response. It is far better to turn off the water and the electricity, and let the tenant suffer the cumulative pressure of unflushed toilets and candles at night and get out voluntarily, than to start manhandling his family and his household goods. Blockade works slowly; it puts the decision up to the other side. To invade Berlin or Cuba is a sudden identifiable action, of an intensity that demands response; but to cut off supplies does little the first day and not much more the second; nobody dies or gets hurt from the initial effects of a blockade. A blockade is comparatively passive; the eventual damage results as much from the obstinacy of the blockaded territory as from the persistence of the blockading power. And there is no well-defined moment before which the blockading power may quail, for fear of causing the ultimate collapse.

President Truman appreciated the value of this tactic in June 1945. French forces under de Gaulle’s leadership had occupied a province in Northern Italy, contrary to Allied plans and American policy. They announced that any effort of their allies to dislodge them would be treated as a hostile act. The French intended to annex the area as a “minor frontier adjustment.” It would have been extraordinarily disruptive of Allied unity, of course, to expel the French by force of arms; arguments got nowhere, so President Truman notified de Gaulle that no more supplies would be issued to the French army until it had withdrawn from the Aosta Valley. The French were absolutely dependent on American supplies and the message brought results. This was “nonhostile” pressure, not quite capable of provoking a militant response, therefore safe to use (and effective).

[…]

Blockade illustrates the typical difference between a threat intended to make an adversary do something and a threat intended to keep him from starting something. The distinction is in the timing and in the initiative, in who has to make the first move, in whose initiative is put to the test. To deter an enemy’s advance it may be enough to burn the escape bridges behind me, or to rig a trip-wire between us that automatically blows us both up when he advances. To compel an enemy’s retreat, though, by some threat of engagement, I have to be committed to move. (This requires setting fire to the grass behind me as I face the enemy, with the wind blowing toward the enemy.) I can block your car by placing mine in the way; my deterrent threat is passive, the decision to collide is up to you. But if you find me in your way and threaten to collide unless I move, you enjoy no such advantage; the decision to collide is still yours, and I still enjoy deterrence. You have to arrange to have to collide unless I move, and that is a degree more complicated. You have to get up so much speed that you cannot stop in time and that only I can avert the collision; this may not be easy. If it takes more time to start a car than to stop one, you may be unable to give me the “last clear chance” to avoid collision by vacating the street.

The threat that compels rather than deters often requires that the punishment be administered until the other acts, rather than if he acts. This is because often the only way to become committed to an action is to initiate it. This means, though, that the action initiated has to be tolerable to the initiator, and tolerable over whatever period of time is required for the pressure to work on the other side. For deterrence, the trip-wire can threaten to blow things up out of all proportion to what is being protected, because if the threat works the thing never goes off. But to hold a large bomb and threaten to throw it unless somebody moves cannot work so well; the threat is not believable until the bomb is actually thrown and by then the damage is done.

There is, then, a difference between deterrence and what we might, for want of a better word, call compellence. The dictionary’s definition of “deter” corresponds to contemporary usage: to turn aside or discourage through fear; hence, to prevent from action by fear of consequences. A difficulty with our being an unaggressive nation, one whose announced aim has usually been to contain rather than to roll back, is that we have not settled on any conventional terminology for the more active kind of threat. We have come to use “defense” as a euphemism for “military,” and have a Defense Department, a defense budget, a defense program, and a defense establishment; if we need the other word, though, the English language provides it easily. It is “offense.” We have no such obvious counterpart to “deterrence.” “Coercion” covers the meaning but unfortunately includes “deterrent” as well as “compellent” intentions. “Intimidation” is insufficiently focused on the particular behavior desired. “Compulsion” is all right but its adjective is “compulsive,” and that has come to carry quite a different meaning. “Compellence” is the best I can do.

Deterrence and compellence differ in a number of respects, most of them corresponding to something like the difference between statics and dynamics. Deterrence involves setting the stage—by announcement, by rigging the trip-wire, by incurring the obligation—and waiting. The overt act is up to the opponent. The stage-setting can often be nonintrusive, nonhostile, nonprovocative. The act that is intrusive, hostile, or provocative is usually the one to be deterred; the deterrent threat only changes the consequences if the act in question—the one to be deterred—is then taken. Compellence, in contrast, usually involves initiating an action (or an irrevocable commitment to action) that can cease, or become harmless, only if the opponent responds. The overt act, the first step, is up to the side that makes the compellent threat. To deter, one digs in, or lays a minefield, and waits—in the interest of inaction. To compel, one gets up enough momentum (figuratively, but sometimes literally) to make the other act to avoid collision.

Deterrence tends to be indefinite in its timing. “If you cross the line we shoot in self-defense, or the mines explode.” When? Whenever you cross the line—preferably never, but the timing is up to you. If you cross it, then is when the threat is fulfilled, either automatically, if we’ve rigged it so, or by obligation that immediately becomes due. But we can wait—preferably forever; that’s our purpose.

Compellence has to be definite: We move, and you must get out of the way. By when? There has to be a deadline, otherwise tomorrow never comes. If the action carries no deadline it is only a posture, or a ceremony with no consequences. If the compellent advance is like Zeno’s tortoise that takes infinitely long to reach the border by traversing, with infinite patience, the infinitely small remaining distances that separate him from collision, it creates no inducement to vacate the border. Compellence, to be effective, can’t wait forever. Still, it has to wait a little; collision can’t be instantaneous. The compellent threat has to be put in motion to be credible, and then the victim must yield. Too little time, and compliance becomes impossible; too much time, and compliance becomes unnecessary. Thus compellence involves timing in a way that deterrence typically does not.

[…]

Actually, any coercive threat requires corresponding assurances; the object of a threat is to give somebody a choice. To say, “One more step and I shoot,” can be a deterrent threat only if accompanied by the implicit assurance, “And if you stop I won’t.” Giving notice of unconditional intent to shoot gives him no choice (unless by behaving as we wish him to behave the opponent puts himself out of range, in which case the effective threat is, “Come closer and my fire will kill you, stay back and it won’t”).

[…]

(Ordinary blackmailers, not just nuclear, find the “assurances” troublesome when their threats are compellent.)

[…]

Because in the West we deal mainly in deterrence, not compellence, and deterrent threats tend to convey their assurances implicitly, we often forget that both sides of the choice, the threatened penalty and the proffered avoidance or reward, need to be credible.

[…]

Blockade, harassment, and “salami tactics” can be interpreted as ways of evading the dangers and difficulties of compellence. Blockade in a cold war sets up a tactical “status quo” that is damaging in the long run but momentarily safe for both sides unless the victim tries to run the blockade. President Kennedy’s overt act of sending the fleet to sea, in “quarantine” of Cuba in October 1962, had some of the quality of deterrent “stage setting”; the Soviet government then had about forty-eight hours to instruct its steamers whether or not to seek collision. Low-level intrusion, as discussed earlier, can be a way of letting the opponent turn his head and yield a little, or it can be a way of starting a compellent action in low gear, without the conviction that goes with greater momentum but also without the greater risk. Instead of speeding out of control toward our car that blocks his way, risking our inability to see him and get our engines started in time to clear his path, he approaches slowly and nudges fenders, crushing a few lights and cracking some paint. If we yield he can keep it up, if not he can cut his losses. And if he makes it look accidental, or can blame it on an impetuous chauffeur, he may not even lose countenance in the unsuccessful try.

[…]

If the object, and the only hope, is to resist successfully, so that the enemy cannot succeed even if he tries, we can call it pure defense. If the object is to induce him not to proceed, by making his encroachment painful or costly, we can call it a “coercive” or “deterrent” defense.

[…]

Defensive action may even be undertaken with no serious hope of repelling or deterring enemy action but with a view to making a “successful” conquest costly enough to deter repetition by the same opponent or anyone else. This is of course the rationale for reprisals after the fact; they cannot undo the deed but can make the books show a net loss and reduce the incentive next time. Defense can sometimes get the same point across, as the Swiss demonstrated in the fifteenth century by the manner in which they lost battles as well as by the way they sometimes won them. “The [Swiss] Confederates were able to reckon their reputation for obstinate and invincible courage as one of the chief causes which gave them political importance. . . . It was no light matter to engage with an enemy who would not retire before any superiority in numbers, who was always ready for a fight, who would neither give nor take quarter.”

[…]

A blockade was thrown around the island, a blockade that by itself could not make the missiles go away. The blockade did, however, threaten a minor military confrontation with major diplomatic stakes—an encounter between American naval vessels and Soviet merchant ships bound for Cuba. Once in place, the Navy was in a position to wait; it was up to the Russians to decide whether to continue. If Soviet ships had been beyond recall, the blockade would have been a preparation for inevitable engagement; with modern communications the ships were not beyond recall, and the Russians were given the last clear chance to turn aside. Physically the Navy could have avoided an encounter; diplomatically, the declaration of quarantine and the dispatch of the Navy meant that American evasion of the encounter was virtually out of the question. For the Russians, the diplomatic cost of turning freighters around, or even letting one be examined, proved not to be prohibitive.

[…]

There is another characteristic of compellent threats, arising in the need for affirmative action, that often distinguishes them from deterrent threats. It is that the very act of compliance—of doing what is demanded—is more conspicuously compliant, more recognizable as submission under duress, than when an act is merely withheld in the face of a deterrent threat. Compliance is likely to be less casual, less capable of being rationalized as something that one was going to do anyhow. The Chinese did not need to acknowledge that they shied away from Quemoy or Formosa because of American threats, and the Russians need not have agreed that it was NATO that deterred them from conquering Western Europe, and no one can be sure. Indeed, if a deterrent threat is created before the proscribed act is even contemplated, there need never be an explicit decision not to transgress, just an absence of any temptation to do the thing prohibited. The Chinese still say they will take Quemoy in their own good time; and the Russians go on saying that their intentions against Western Europe were never aggressive.

The Russians cannot, though, claim that they were on the point of removing their missiles from Cuba anyway, and that the President’s television broadcast, the naval quarantine and threats of more violent action, had no effect.

[…]

If the object is actually to impose humiliation, to force a showdown and to get an acknowledgement of submission, then the “challenge” that is often embodied in an active compellent threat is something to be exploited.

[…]

Skill is required to devise a compellent action that does not have this self-defeating quality. There is an argument here for sometimes not being too explicit or too open about precisely what is demanded, if the demands can be communicated more privately and noncommittally. President Johnson was widely criticized in the press, shortly after the bombing attacks began in early 1965, for not having made his objectives entirely clear. How could the North Vietnamese comply if they did not know exactly what was wanted? Whatever the reason for the American Administration’s being somewhat inexplicit—whether it chose to be inexplicit, did not know how to be explicit, or in fact was explicit but only privately—an important possibility is that vague demands, though hard to understand, can be less embarrassing to comply with.

[…]

Not enough is known publicly to permit us to judge this Vietnamese instance; but it points up the important possibility that a compellent threat may have to be focused on results rather than contributory deeds, like the father’s demand that his son’s school grades be improved, or the extortionist’s demand, “Get me money. I don’t care how you get it, just get it.” A difficulty, of course, is that results are more a matter of interpretations than deeds usually are. Whenever a recipient of foreign aid, for example, is told that it must eliminate domestic corruption, improve its balance of payments, or raise the quality of its civil service, the results tend to be uncertain, protracted, and hard to attribute. The country may try to comply and fail; with luck it may succeed without trying; it may have indifferent success that is hard to judge; in any case compliance is usually arguable and often visible only in retrospect.

[…]

The Japanese surrender of 1945 was marked as much by changes in the structure of authority and influence within the government as by changes in attitude on the part of individuals. The victims of coercion, or the individuals most sensitive to coercive threats, may not be directly in authority; or they may be hopelessly committed to non-compliant policies. They may have to bring bureaucratic skill or political pressure to bear on individuals who do exercise authority, or go through processes that shift authority or blame to others. In the extreme case governing authorities may be wholly unsusceptible to coercion—may, as a party or as individuals, have everything to lose and little to save by yielding to coercive threats—and actual revolt may be essential to the process of compliance, or sabotage or assassination. Hitler was uncoercible; some of his generals were not, but they lacked organization and skill and failed in their plot. For working out the incentive structure of a threat, its communication requirements and its mechanism, analogies with individuals are helpful; but they are counterproductive if they make us forget that a government does not reach a decision in the same way as an individual in a government. Collective decision depends on the internal politics and bureaucracy of government, on the chain of command and on lines of communication, on party structures and pressure groups, as well as on individual values and careers. This affects the speed of decision, too.

[…]

Second, if the object is to induce compliance and not to start a spiral of reprisals and counteractions, it is helpful to show the limits to what one is demanding, and this can often be best shown by designing a campaign that distinguishes what is demanded from all the other objectives that one might have been seeking but is not.

[…]

The ideal compellent action would be one that, once initiated, causes minimal harm if compliance is forthcoming and great harm if compliance is not forthcoming, is consistent with the time schedule of feasible compliance, is beyond recall once initiated, and cannot be stopped by the party that started it but automatically stops upon compliance, with all this fully understood by the adversary.

[…]

Turning off the water supply at Guantanamo creates a finite rate of privation over time. Buzzing an airplane in the Berlin corridor does no harm unless the planes collide; they probably will not collide but they may and if they do the result is sudden, dramatic, irreversible, and grave enough to make even a small probability a serious one.

The creation of risk—usually a shared risk—is the technique of compellence that probably best deserves the name of “brinkmanship.”

Thomas Schelling explains the diplomacy of violence in Arms and Influence:

Diplomacy is bargaining; it seeks outcomes that, though not ideal for either party, are better for both than some of the alternatives. In diplomacy each party somewhat controls what the other wants, and can get more by compromise, exchange, or collaboration than by taking things in his own hands and ignoring the other’s wishes. The bargaining can be polite or rude, entail threats as well as offers, assume a status quo or ignore all rights and privileges, and assume mistrust rather than trust. But whether polite or impolite, constructive or aggressive, respectful or vicious, whether it occurs among friends or antagonists and whether or not there is a basis for trust and goodwill, there must be some common interest, if only in the avoidance of mutual damage, and an awareness of the need to make the other party prefer an outcome acceptable to oneself.

With enough military force a country may not need to bargain. Some things a country wants it can take, and some things it has it can keep, by sheer strength, skill and ingenuity. It can do this forcibly, accommodating only to opposing strength, skill, and ingenuity and without trying to appeal to an enemy’s wishes.

[…]

There is something else, though, that force can do. It is less military, less heroic, less impersonal, and less unilateral; it is uglier, and has received less attention in Western military strategy. In addition to seizing and holding, disarming and confining, penetrating and obstructing, and all that, military force can be used to hurt. In addition to taking and protecting things of value it can destroy value. In addition to weakening an enemy militarily it can cause an enemy plain suffering.

[…]

Forcible action will work against weeds or floods as well as against armies, but suffering requires a victim that can feel pain or has something to lose. To inflict suffering gains nothing and saves nothing directly; it can only make people behave to avoid it. The only purpose, unless sport or revenge, must be to influence somebody’s behavior, to coerce his decision or choice. To be coercive, violence has to be anticipated. And it has to be avoidable by accommodation. The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy—vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.

There is a difference between taking what you want and making someone give it to you, between fending off assault and making someone afraid to assault you, between holding what people are trying to take and making them afraid to take it, between losing what someone can forcibly take and giving it up to avoid risk or damage. It is the difference between defense and deterrence, between brute force and intimidation, between conquest and blackmail, between action and threats. It is the difference between the unilateral, “undiplomatic” recourse to strength, and coercive diplomacy based on the power to hurt.

[…]

The purely “military” or “undiplomatic” recourse to forcible action is concerned with enemy strength, not enemy interests; the coercive use of the power to hurt, though, is the very exploitation of enemy wants and fears. And brute strength is usually measured relative to enemy strength, the one directly opposing the other, while the power to hurt is typically not reduced by the enemy’s power to hurt in return. Opposing strengths may cancel each other, pain and grief do not. The willingness to hurt, the credibility of a threat, and the ability to exploit the power to hurt will indeed depend on how much the adversary can hurt in return; but there is little or nothing about an adversary’s pain or grief that directly reduces one’s own. Two sides cannot both overcome each other with superior strength; they may both be able to hurt each other.

[…]

And brute force succeeds when it is used, whereas the power to hurt is most successful when held in reserve. It is the threat of damage, or of more damage to come, that can make someone yield or comply. It is latent violence that can influence someone’s choice—violence that can still be withheld or inflicted, or that a victim believes can be withheld or inflicted. The threat of pain tries to structure someone’s motives, while brute force tries to overcome his strength. Unhappily, the power to hurt is often communicated by some performance of it.

[…]

To exploit a capacity for hurting and inflicting damage one needs to know what an adversary treasures and what scares him and one needs the adversary to understand what behavior of his will cause the violence to be inflicted and what will cause it to be withheld. The victim has to know what is wanted, and he may have to be assured of what is not wanted. The pain and suffering have to appear contingent on his behavior; it is not alone the threat that is effective—the threat of pain or loss if he fails to comply—but the corresponding assurance, possibly an implicit one, that he can avoid the pain or loss if he does comply.

[…]

Coercion requires finding a bargain, arranging for him to be better off doing what we want—worse off not doing what we want—when he takes the threatened penalty into account.

[…]

It is also the power to hurt rather than brute force that we use in dealing with criminals; we hurt them afterward, or threaten to, for their misdeeds rather than protect ourselves with cordons of electric wires, masonry walls, and armed guards. Jail, of course, can be either forcible restraint or threatened privation; if the object is to keep criminals out of mischief by confinement, success is measured by how many of them are gotten behind bars, but if the object is to threaten privation, success will be measured by how few have to be put behind bars and success then depends on the subject’s understanding of the consequences.

Pure damage is what a car threatens when it tries to hog the road or to keep its rightful share, or to go first through an intersection. A tank or a bulldozer can force its way regardless of others’ wishes; the rest of us have to threaten damage, usually mutual damage, hoping the other driver values his car or his limbs enough to give way, hoping he sees us, and hoping he is in control of his own car. The threat of pure damage will not work against an unmanned vehicle.

[…]

To hunt down Comanches and to exterminate them was brute force; to raid their villages to make them behave was coercive diplomacy, based on the power to hurt. The pain and loss to the Indians might have looked much the same one way as the other; the difference was one of purpose and effect. If Indians were killed because they were in the way, or somebody wanted their land, or the authorities despaired of making them behave and could not confine them and decided to exterminate them, that was pure unilateral force. If some Indians were killed to make other Indians behave, that was coercive violence—or intended to be, whether or not it was effective.

[…]

The contrast between brute force and coercion is illustrated by two alternative strategies attributed to Genghis Khan. Early in his career he pursued the war creed of the Mongols: the vanquished can never be the friends of the victors, their death is necessary for the victor’s safety. This was the unilateral extermination of a menace or a liability. The turning point of his career, according to Lynn Montross, came later when he discovered how to use his power to hurt for diplomatic ends. “The great Khan, who was not inhibited by the usual mercies, conceived the plan of forcing captives—women, children, aged fathers, favorite sons—to march ahead of his army as the first potential victims of resistance.” 1 Live captives have often proved more valuable than enemy dead; and the technique discovered by the Khan in his maturity remains contemporary. North Koreans and Chinese were reported to have quartered prisoners of war near strategic targets to inhibit bombing attacks by United Nations aircraft. Hostages represent the power to hurt in its purest form.

[…]

For many years the Greeks and the Turks on Cyprus could hurt each other indefinitely but neither could quite take or hold forcibly what they wanted or protect themselves from violence by physical means. The Jews in Palestine could not expel the British in the late 1940s but they could cause pain and fear and frustration through terrorism, and eventually influence somebody’s decision. The brutal war in Algeria was more a contest in pure violence than in military strength; the question was who would first find the pain and degradation unendurable. The French troops preferred—indeed they continually tried—to make it a contest of strength, to pit military force against the nationalists’ capacity for terror, to exterminate or disable the nationalists and to screen off the nationalists from the victims of their violence. But because in civil war terrorists commonly have access to victims by sheer physical propinquity, the victims and their properties could not be forcibly defended and in the end the French troops themselves resorted, unsuccessfully, to a war of pain.

Nobody believes that the Russians can take Hawaii from us, or New York, or Chicago, but nobody doubts that they might destroy people and buildings in Hawaii, Chicago, or New York.

[…]

We have a Department of Defense but emphasize retaliation—“ to return evil for evil” (synonyms: requital, reprisal, revenge, vengeance, retribution).

[…]

War appears to be, or threatens to be, not so much a contest of strength as one of endurance, nerve, obstinacy, and pain. It appears to be, and threatens to be, not so much a contest of military strength as a bargaining process—dirty, extortionate, and often quite reluctant bargaining on one side or both—nevertheless a bargaining process.

[…]

The principle is illustrated by a technique of unarmed combat: one can disable a man by various stunning, fracturing, or killing blows, but to take him to jail one has to exploit the man’s own efforts. “Come-along” holds are those that threaten pain or disablement, giving relief as long as the victim complies, giving him the option of using his own legs to get to jail.

[…]

Similarly on the battlefield: tactics that frighten soldiers so that they run, duck their heads, or lay down their arms and surrender represent coercion based on the power to hurt; to the top command, which is frustrated but not coerced, such tactics are part of the contest in military discipline and strength.

[…]

Ancient wars were often quite “total” for the loser, the men being put to death, the women sold as slaves, the boys castrated, the cattle slaughtered, and the buildings leveled, for the sake of revenge, justice, personal gain, or merely custom.

[…]

When Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders in 1099 the ensuing slaughter was one of the bloodiest in military chronicles. “The men of the West literally waded in gore, their march to the church of the Holy Sepulcher being gruesomely likened to ‘treading out the wine press’ . . . ,” reports Montross (p. 138), who observes that these excesses usually came at the climax of the capture of a fortified post or city. “For long the assailants have endured more punishment than they were able to inflict; then once the walls are breached, pent up emotions find an outlet in murder, rape and plunder, which discipline is powerless to prevent.”

[…]

Violence is most purposive and most successful when it is threatened and not used. Successful threats are those that do not have to be carried out. By European standards, Denmark was virtually unharmed in the Second World War; it was violence that made the Danes submit. Withheld violence—successfully threatened violence—can look clean, even merciful. The fact that a kidnap victim is returned unharmed, against receipt of ample ransom, does not make kidnapping a nonviolent enterprise. The American victory at Mexico City in 1847 was a great success; with a minimum of brutality we traded a capital city for everything we wanted from the war. We did not even have to say what we could do to Mexico City to make the Mexican government understand what they had at stake. (They had undoubtedly got the message a month earlier, when Vera Cruz was being pounded into submission. After forty-eight hours of shellfire, the foreign consuls in that city approached General Scott’s headquarters to ask for a truce so that women, children, and neutrals could evacuate the city. General Scott, “counting on such internal pressure to help bring about the city’s surrender,” refused their request and added that anyone, soldier or noncombatant, who attempted to leave the city would be fired upon.)

[…]

Surrender negotiations are the place where the threat of civil violence can come to the fore. Surrender negotiations are often so one-sided, or the potential violence so unmistakable, that bargaining succeeds and the violence remains in reserve. But the fact that most of the actual damage was done during the military stage of the war, prior to victory and defeat, does not mean that violence was idle in the aftermath, only that it was latent and the threat of it successful.

[…]

Colonial conquest has often been a matter of “punitive expeditions” rather than genuine military engagements. If the tribesmen escape into the bush you can burn their villages without them until they assent to receive what, in strikingly modern language, used to be known as the Queen’s “protection.” British air power was used punitively against Arabian tribesmen in the 1920s and 30s to coerce them into submission.

[…]

When Caesar was pacifying the tribes of Gaul he sometimes had to fight his way through their armed men in order to subdue them with a display of punitive violence, but sometimes he was virtually unopposed and could proceed straight to the punitive display. To his legions there was more valor in fighting their way to the seat of power; but, as governor of Gaul, Caesar could view enemy troops only as an obstacle to his political control, and that control was usually based on the power to inflict pain, grief, and privation. In fact, he preferred to keep several hundred hostages from the unreliable tribes, so that his threat of violence did not even depend on an expedition into the countryside.

[…]

In 1868, during the war with the Cheyennes, General Sheridan decided that his best hope was to attack the Indians in their winter camps. His reasoning was that the Indians could maraud as they pleased during the seasons when their ponies could subsist on grass, and in winter hide away in remote places. “To disabuse their minds from the idea that they were secure from punishment, and to strike at a period when they were helpless to move their stock and villages, a winter campaign was projected against the large bands hiding away in the Indian territory.”

[…]

The Indians themselves totally lacked organization and discipline, and typically could not afford enough ammunition for target practice and were no military match for the cavalry; their own rudimentary strategy was at best one of harassment and reprisal. Half a century of Indian fighting in the West left us a legacy of cavalry tactics; but it is hard to find a serious treatise on American strategy against the Indians or Indian strategy against the whites.

[…]

For the most part, the Civil War was a military engagement with each side’s military force pitted against the other’s. The Confederate forces hoped to lay waste enough Union territory to negotiate their independence, but hadn’t enough capacity for such violence to make it work. The Union forces were intent on military victory, and it was mainly General Sherman’s march through Georgia that showed a conscious and articulate use of violence. “If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war . . . If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war,” Sherman wrote. And one of his associates said, “Sherman is perfectly right . . . The only possible way to end this unhappy and dreadful conflict . . . is to make it terrible beyond endurance.”

[…]

General Sherman’s attempt to make war hell for the Southern people did not come to epitomize military strategy for the century to follow. To seek out and to destroy the enemy’s military force, to achieve a crushing victory over enemy armies, was still the avowed purpose and the central aim of American strategy in both world wars. Military action was seen as an alternative to bargaining, not a process of bargaining.

[…]

The reason is apparently that the technology and geography of warfare, at least for a war between anything like equal powers during the century ending in World War II, kept coercive violence from being decisive before military victory was achieved. Blockade indeed was aimed at the whole enemy nation, not concentrated on its military forces; the German civilians who died of influenza in the First World War were victims of violence directed at the whole country. It has never been quite clear whether blockade—of the South in the Civil War or of the Central Powers in both world wars, or submarine warfare against Britain—was expected to make war unendurable for the people or just to weaken the enemy forces by denying economic support. Both arguments were made, but there was no need to be clear about the purpose as long as either purpose was regarded as legitimate and either might be served. “Strategic bombing” of enemy homelands was also occasionally rationalized in terms of the pain and privation it could inflict on people and the civil damage it could do to the nation, as an effort to display either to the population or to the enemy leadership that surrender was better than persistence in view of the damage that could be done. It was also rationalized in more “military” terms, as a way of selectively denying war material to the troops or as a way of generally weakening the economy on which the military effort rested.

But as terrorism—as violence intended to coerce the enemy rather than to weaken him militarily—blockade and strategic bombing by themselves were not quite up to the job in either world war in Europe. (They might have been sufficient in the war with Japan after straightforward military action had brought American aircraft into range.)

[…]

Hitler’s V-1 buzz bomb and his V-2 rocket are fairly pure cases of weapons whose purpose was to intimidate, to hurt Britain itself rather than Allied military forces. What the V-2 needed was a punitive payload worth carrying, and the Germans did not have it.

[…]

The great exception was the two atomic bombs on Japanese cities. These were weapons of terror and shock. They hurt, and promised more hurt, and that was their purpose. The few “small” weapons we had were undoubtedly of some direct military value, but their enormous advantage was in pure violence. In a military sense the United States could gain a little by destruction of two Japanese industrial cities; in a civilian sense, the Japanese could lose much. The bomb that hit Hiroshima was a threat aimed at all of Japan. The political target of the bomb was not the dead of Hiroshima or the factories they worked in, but the survivors in Tokyo. The two bombs were in the tradition of Sheridan against the Comanches and Sherman in Georgia. Whether in the end those two bombs saved lives or wasted them, Japanese lives or American lives; whether punitive coercive violence is uglier than straightforward military force or more civilized; whether terror is more or less humane than military destruction; we can at least perceive that the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented violence against the country itself and not mainly an attack on Japan’s material strength. The effect of the bombs, and their purpose, were not mainly the military destruction they accomplished but the pain and the shock and the promise of more.

[…]

Japan was defenseless by August 1945. With a combination of bombing and blockade, eventually invasion, and if necessary the deliberate spread of disease, the United States could probably have exterminated the population of the Japanese islands without nuclear weapons. It would have been a gruesome, expensive, and mortifying campaign; it would have taken time and demanded persistence. But we had the economic and technical capacity to do it; and, together with the Russians or without them, we could have done the same in many populous parts of the world. Against defenseless people there is not much that nuclear weapons can do that cannot be done with an ice pick. And it would not have strained our Gross National Product to do it with ice picks.

[…]

Nuclear weapons can do it quickly. That makes a difference. When the Crusaders breached the walls of Jerusalem they sacked the city while the mood was on them.

[…]

To compress a catastrophic war within the span of time that a man can stay awake drastically changes the politics of war, the process of decision, the possibility of central control and restraint, the motivations of people in charge, and the capacity to think and reflect while war is in progress. It is imaginable that we might destroy 200,000,000 Russians in a war of the present, though not 80,000,000 Japanese in a war of the past.

[…]

Earlier wars, like World Wars I and II or the Franco-Prussian War, were limited by termination, by an ending that occurred before the period of greatest potential violence, by negotiation that brought the threat of pain and privation to bear but often precluded the massive exercise of civilian violence.

[…]

With two-dimensional warfare, there is a tendency for troops to confront each other, shielding their own lands while attempting to press into each other’s. Small penetrations could not do major damage to the people; large penetrations were so destructive of military organization that they usually ended the military phase of the war.

Nuclear weapons make it possible to do monstrous violence to the enemy without first achieving victory. With nuclear weapons and today’s means of delivery, one expects to penetrate an enemy homeland without first collapsing his military force.

[…]

Victory is no longer a prerequisite for hurting the enemy. And it is no assurance against being terribly hurt.

[…]

Not only can nuclear weapons hurt the enemy before the war has been won, and perhaps hurt decisively enough to make the military engagement academic, but it is widely assumed that in a major war that is all they can do.

[…]

It is not “overkill” that is new; the American army surely had enough 30 caliber bullets to kill everybody in the world in 1945, or if it did not it could have bought them without any strain. What is new is plain “kill”—the idea that major war might be just a contest in the killing of countries, or not even a contest but just two parallel exercises in devastation.

[…]

Two gunfighters facing each other in a Western town had an unquestioned capacity to kill one another; that did not guarantee that both would die in a gunfight—only the slower of the two. Less deadly weapons, permitting an injured one to shoot back before he died, might have been more conducive to a restraining balance of terror, or of caution. The very efficiency of nuclear weapons could make them ideal for starting war, if they can suddenly eliminate the enemy’s capability to shoot back.

[…]

In World Wars I and II one went to work on enemy military forces, not his people, because until the enemy’s military forces had been taken care of there was typically not anything decisive that one could do to the enemy nation itself. The Germans did not, in World War I, refrain from bayoneting French citizens by the millions in the hope that the Allies would abstain from shooting up the German population. They could not get at the French citizens until they had breached the Allied lines. Hitler tried to terrorize London and did not make it. The Allied air forces took the war straight to Hitler’s territory, with at least some thought of doing in Germany what Sherman recognized he was doing in Georgia; but with the bombing technology of World War II one could not afford to bypass the troops and go exclusively for enemy populations—not, anyway, in Germany. With nuclear weapons one has that alternative.

[…]

Almost one hundred years before Secretary McNamara’s speech, the Declaration of St. Petersburg (the first of the great modern conferences to cope with the evils of warfare) in 1868 asserted, “The only legitimate object which states should endeavor to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces of the enemy.” And in a letter to the League of Nations in 1920, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote; “The Committee considers it very desirable that war should resume its former character, that is to say, that it should be a struggle between armies and not between populations. The civilian population must, as far as possible, remain outside the struggle and its consequences.”

[…]

In the present era noncombatants appear to be not only deliberate targets but primary targets, or at least were so taken for granted until about the time of Secretary McNamara’s speech. In fact, noncombatants appeared to be primary targets at both ends of the scale of warfare; thermonuclear war threatened to be a contest in the destruction of cities and populations; and, at the other end of the scale, insurgency is almost entirely terroristic. We live in an era of dirty war.

[…]

From about 1648 to the Napoleonic era, war in much of Western Europe was something superimposed on society. It was a contest engaged in by monarchies for stakes that were measured in territories and, occasionally, money or dynastic claims. The troops were mostly mercenaries and the motivation for war was confined to the aristocratic elite. Monarchs fought for bits of territory, but the residents of disputed terrain were more concerned with protecting their crops and their daughters from marauding troops than with whom they owed allegiance to. They were, as Quincy Wright remarked in his classic Study of War, little concerned that the territory in which they lived had a new sovereign.

Furthermore, as far as the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria were concerned, the loyalty and enthusiasm of the Bohemian farmer were not decisive considerations. It is an exaggeration to refer to European war during this period as a sport of kings, but not a gross exaggeration. And the military logistics of those days confined military operations to a scale that did not require the enthusiasm of a multitude.

Hurting people was not a decisive instrument of warfare. Hurting people or destroying property only reduced the value of the things that were being fought over, to the disadvantage of both sides. Furthermore, the monarchs who conducted wars often did not want to discredit the social institutions they shared with their enemies. Bypassing an enemy monarch and taking the war straight to his people would have had revolutionary implications. Destroying the opposing monarchy was often not in the interest of either side; opposing sovereigns had much more in common with each other than with their own subjects, and to discredit the claims of a monarchy might have produced a disastrous backlash.

[…]

This was changed during the Napoleonic wars. In Napoleon’s France, people cared about the outcome. The nation was mobilized. The war was a national effort, not just an activity of the elite. It was both political and military genius on the part of Napoleon and his ministers that an entire nation could be mobilized for war. Propaganda became a tool of warfare, and war became vulgarized.

Many writers deplored this popularization of war, this involvement of the democratic masses. In fact, the horrors we attribute to thermonuclear war were already foreseen by many commentators, some before the First World War and more after it; but the new “weapon” to which these terrors were ascribed was people, millions of people, passionately engaged in national wars, spending themselves in a quest for total victory and desperate to avoid total defeat. Today we are impressed that a small number of highly trained pilots can carry enough energy to blast and burn tens of millions of people and the buildings they live in; two or three generations ago there was concern that tens of millions of people using bayonets and barbed wire, machine guns and shrapnel, could create the same kind of destruction and disorder.

That was the second stage in the relation of people to war, the second in Europe since the middle of the seventeenth century. In the first stage people had been neutral but their welfare might be disregarded; in the second stage people were involved because it was their war. Some fought, some produced materials of war, some produced food, and some took care of children; but they were all part of a war-making nation. When Hitler attacked Poland in 1939, the Poles had reason to care about the outcome. When Churchill said the British would fight on the beaches, he spoke for the British and not for a mercenary army. The war was about something that mattered. If people would rather fight a dirty war than lose a clean one, the war will be between nations and not just between governments. If people have an influence on whether the war is continued or on the terms of a truce, making the war hurt people serves a purpose. It is a dirty purpose, but war itself is often about something dirty.

[…]

“Surrender” is the process following military hostilities in which the power to hurt is brought to bear. If surrender negotiations are successful and not followed by overt violence, it is because the capacity to inflict pain and damage was successfully used in the bargaining process. On the losing side, prospective pain and damage were averted by concessions; on the winning side, the capacity for inflicting further harm was traded for concessions. The same is true in a successful kidnapping. It only reminds us that the purpose of pure pain and damage is extortion; it is latent violence that can be used to advantage. A well-behaved occupied country is not one in which violence plays no part; it may be one in which latent violence is used so skillfully that it need not be spent in punishment.

[…]

If the pain and damage can be inflicted during war itself, they need not wait for the surrender negotiation that succeeds a military decision. If one can coerce people and their governments while war is going on, one does not need to wait until he has achieved victory or risk losing that coercive power by spending it all in a losing war. General Sherman’s march through Georgia might have made as much sense, possibly more, had the North been losing the war, just as the German buzz bombs and V-2 rockets can be thought of as coercive instruments to get the war stopped before suffering military defeat.

In the present era, since at least the major East–West powers are capable of massive civilian violence during war itself beyond anything available during the Second World War, the occasion for restraint does not await the achievement of military victory or truce.

[…]

The Korean War was furiously “all-out” in the fighting, not only on the peninsular battlefield but in the resources used by both sides. It was “all-out,” though, only within some dramatic restraints: no nuclear weapons, no Russians, no Chinese territory, no Japanese territory, no bombing of ships at sea or even airfields on the United Nations side of the line. It was a contest in military strength circumscribed by the threat of unprecedented civilian violence. Korea may or may not be a good model for speculation on limited war in the age of nuclear violence, but it was dramatic evidence that the capacity for violence can be consciously restrained even under the provocation of a war that measures its military dead in tens of thousands and that fully preoccupies two of the largest countries in the world.

A consequence of this third stage is that “victory” inadequately expresses what a nation wants from its military forces. Mostly it wants, in these times, the influence that resides in latent force.

[…]

The judgment that the Mexicans would concede Texas, New Mexico, and California once Mexico City was a hostage in our hands was a diplomatic judgment, not a military one. If one could not readily take the particular territory he wanted or hold it against attack, he could take something else and trade it.

[…]

Military strategy can no longer be thought of, as it could for some countries in some eras, as the science of military victory. It is now equally, if not more, the art of coercion, of intimidation and deterrence. The instruments of war are more punitive than acquisitive. Military strategy, whether we like it or not, has become the diplomacy of violence.

Before Thomas Schelling wrote his new preface for 2008 edition of Arms and Influence, he of course wrote the original preface:

One of the lamentable principles of human productivity is that it is easier to destroy than to create. A house that takes several man-years to build can be burned in an hour by any young delinquent who has the price of a box of matches. Poisoning dogs is cheaper than raising them. And a country can destroy more with twenty billion dollars of nuclear armament than it can create with twenty billion dollars of foreign investment. The harm that people can do, or that nations can do, is impressive. And it is often used to impress.

The power to hurt—the sheer unacquisitive, unproductive power to destroy things that somebody treasures, to inflict pain and grief—is a kind of bargaining power, not easy to use but used often. In the underworld it is the basis for blackmail, extortion, and kidnapping, in the commercial world for boycotts, strikes, and lockouts. In some countries it is regularly used to coerce voters, bureaucrats, even the police; and it underlies the humane as well as the corporal punishments that society uses to deter crime and delinquency. It has its nonviolent forms like the sit-ins that cause nuisance or loss of income, and its subtle forms like the self-inflicted violence that sheds guilt or shame on others. Even the law itself can be exploited: since the days of early Athens, people have threatened lawsuits to extort money, owed them or not. It is often the basis for discipline, civilian and military; and gods use it to exact obedience.

The bargaining power that comes from the physical harm a nation can do to another nation is reflected in notions like deterrence, retaliation and reprisal, terrorism and wars of nerve, nuclear blackmail, armistice and surrender, as well as in reciprocal efforts to restrain that harm in the treatment of prisoners, in the limitation of war, and in the regulation of armaments. Military force can sometimes be used to achieve an objective forcibly, without persuasion or intimidation; usually, though—throughout history but particularly now—military potential is used to influence other countries, their government or their people, by the harm it could do to them. It may be used skillfully or clumsily, and it can be used for evil or in self protection, even in the pursuit of peace; but used as bargaining power it is part of diplomacy—the uglier, more negative, less civilized part of diplomacy—nevertheless, diplomacy.

There is no traditional name for this kind of diplomacy. It is not “military strategy,” which has usually meant the art or science of military victory; and while the object of victory has traditionally been described as “imposing one’s will on the enemy,” how to do that has typically received less attention than the conduct of campaigns and wars. It is a part of diplomacy that, at least in this country, was abnormal and episodic, not central and continuous, and that was often abdicated to the military when war was imminent or in progress. For the last two decades, though, this part of diplomacy has been central and continuous; in the United States there has been a revolution in the relation of military to foreign policy at the same time as the revolution in explosive power.

I have tried in this book to discern a few of the principles that underlie this diplomacy of violence.

Thomas Schelling opens the 2008 edition of his Arms and Influence with a new preface:

The world has changed since I wrote this book in the 1960s. Most notably, the hostility, and the nuclear weapons surrounding that hostility, between the United States and the Soviet Union—between NATO and the Warsaw Pact—has dissolved with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. A somewhat militarily hostile Russia survives the Cold War, but nobody worries (that I know of) about nuclear confrontations between the new Russia and the United States.

The most astonishing development during these more than forty years—a development that no one I have known could have imagined—is that during the rest of the twentieth century, for fifty-five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered the world’s first nuclear bombs, not a single nuclear weapon was exploded in warfare. As I write this in early 2008, it is sixty-two and a half years since the second, and last, nuclear weapon exploded in anger, above a Japanese city. Since then there have been, depending on how you count, either five or six wars in which one side had nuclear weapons and kept them unused.

[…]

Nuclear weapons were not used in the United Nations’ defense of South Korea. They were not used in the succeeding war with the People’s Republic of China. They were not used in the U.S. war in Vietnam. They were not used in 1973 when Egypt had two armies on the Israeli side of the Suez Canal. They were not used in the British war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. And, most impressively, they were not used by the Soviet Union when it fought, and lost, a protracted, demoralizing war in Afghanistan.

This “taboo,” as it has come to be called, is an asset to be treasured. It’s our main hope that we can go another sixty years without nuclear war.

The nonproliferation program has been more successful than any student of the subject would have thought likely, or even possible, at the time this book was written. There are, in 2008, nine, possibly going on ten, nations that have nuclear weapons. When this book was being written, serious estimates suggested that three or four times that number would have nuclear weapons within the century. This outcome partly reflects successful policy and partly reflects the loss of interest in nuclear electric power, especially after the explosion in Ukraine of the Chernobyl reactor complex in 1986.

[…]

Smart terrorists—and the people who might assemble nuclear explosive devices, if they can get the fissionable material, will have to be highly intelligent—should be able to appreciate that such weapons have a comparative advantage toward influence, not simple destruction. I hope they might learn to appreciate that from reading this book.

[…]

Actually, I found the first sentence of the original preface to be even more portentous than I could make it in the 1960s. “One of the lamentable principles of human productivity is that it is easier to destroy than to create.” That principle is now the foundation for our worst apprehensions.

I had to coin a term. “Deterrence” was well understood. To “deter” was, as one dictionary said, to “prevent or discourage from acting by means of fear, doubt, or the like,” and in the words of another, “to turn aside or discourage through fear; hence, to prevent from action by fear of consequences,” from the Latin to “frighten from.” Deterrence was in popular usage not just in military strategy but also in criminal law. It was, complementary to “containment,” the basis of our American policy toward the Soviet bloc. But deterrence is passive; it posits a response to something unacceptable but is quiescent in the absence of provocation. It is something like “defense” in contrast to “offense.” We have a Department of Defense, no longer a War Department, “defense” being the peaceable side of military action.

But what do we call the threatening action that is intended not to forestall some adversarial action but to bring about some desired action, through “fear of consequences”? “Coercion” covers it, but coercion includes deterrence—that is, preventing action—as well as forcing action through fear of consequences. To talk about the latter we need a word. I chose “compellence.” It is now almost, but not quite, part of the strategic vocabulary. I think it will be even more necessary in the future as we analyze not just what the United States—“ we”—needs to do but how various adversaries—“ they”—may attempt to take advantage of their capacity to do harm.

We have seen that deterrence, even nuclear deterrence, doesn’t always work. When North Korea attacked the South, it wasn’t deterred by U.S. nuclear weapons; nor was China deterred from entering South Korea as U.S. troops approached the Chinese border (and the United States was not deterred by Chinese threats to enter the fray). Egypt and Syria in 1973 were not deterred by Israeli nuclear weapons, which they knew existed. Maybe Egypt and Syria believed (correctly?) that Israel had too much at stake in the nuclear taboo to respond to the invasion by using nuclear weapons, even on Egyptian armies in the Sinai desert with no civilians anywhere near.

But “mutual deterrence,” involving the United States and the Soviet Union, was impressively successful. We can hope that Indians and Pakistanis will draw the appropriate lesson. If this book can help to persuade North Koreans, Iranians, or any others who may contemplate or acquire nuclear weapons to think seriously about deterrence, and how it may accomplish more than pure destruction, both they and we may be the better for it.