Deterrence

“Deterrence,” explains the title character of Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 film Dr. Strangelove, “is the art of producing, in the mind of the enemy, the fear to attack.” While an object of ridicule in the film, the good doctor was right. At about the same time that Kubrick was explaining the emerging theory of deterrence to the world, a young Harvard University professor, who would shortly make a name for himself outside the hallowed halls of academe, ventured his own remarkably similar definition. In his 1962 study, The Necessity for Choice, Henry Kissinger explained the following: