Deterrence

Deterrence Theory

During the Cold War, rational choice, also known as cost-benefit analysis and game theory, dominated the writings on deterrence. Writers in the cost-benefit analysis school presuppose that the actors are rational and will apply a classic cost-benefit analysis. They further presuppose that if the costs of challenging another actor are too great, then the rational acting challenger will back down and deterrence will succeed. While studies confirm that this theory played out successfully during the nuclear age, when American nuclear power deterred the Soviet Union on countless occasions, conventional forces as often as not failed to deter challengers prior to 1945. In particular, weaker states while fearing the costs of military action sometimes perceived that inaction carried greater risks.

A second theoretical approach, game theory, pioneered by Thomas C. Schelling during the 1960s, also presupposed rational actors that were motivated by goals that can be rationally calculated and quantified. Game theory, however, made greater use of psychological factors and recognized that success depended in part on credibility, which is the ability to convince an opponent that a given action will invite severe consequences. In what some game theorists refer to as a “chicken game,” the deterring actor must convince the challenger that it will not back down in the face of threats no matter how severe and that the deterring party will even accept its own destruction. This refinement of game theory led, during the Cold War, to the concept of mutually assured destruction. A counterpart to mutually assured destruction, proportional response, which evolved at about the same time, stressed that to retain credibility, deterrence must be proportional to the issue at stake; put another way, a defender cannot deter an aggressor when the only means at its disposal is massive retaliation and a general nuclear war. Game theory then, far more than cost-benefit analysis, sees deterrence as a fluid or ongoing process where the actors are constantly evaluating information.

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