Mismatched Deterrents: Preventing the Use of Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons

Abstract

The basic logic of graduated deterrence worked fairly well against the Soviet Union, as each level of aggression was to be deterred by a matching response. But this logic has now been undermined vis-à-vis future rogue state chemical and biological attacks by the spread of dual-use technologies that can be diverted to weapons, and by decisions of the United States and other democracies to forego possession of chemical or biological weapons. This article identifies some of the serious difficulties of alternative approaches to deterring chemical or biological attacks, ranging from nuclear escalation to a reliance on supposed American advantages in conventional weapons. Lumping chemical and biological weapons together with nuclear weapons into a new category of "weapons of mass destruction" is a very imperfect solution.

Talking Peace, Making Weapons

“…Most of the literature on nuclear proliferation focuses on why states seek nuclear weapons (Jo and Gartzke 2007;Powell 2003;Quester 2000;Rublee 2009;Sagan 1996Sagan /1997Solingen 2007) and whether their acquisition has any effect (Beardsley and Asal 2009;Gartzke and Jo 2009;Rauchhaus 2009;Waltz and Sagan 2002). New scholarship is subjecting the broad set of causes and consequences of proliferation proposed by these studies to detailed scrutiny (Gartzke and Kroenig 2014)-from the role of security guarantees and forward deployed weapons in preventing proliferation (Bleek and Lorber 2014;Fuhrmann and Sechser 2014), to the trade-offs among different types of weapons of mass destruction (Horowitz and Narang 2014), to the factors that lead states to choose particular types of nuclear weapons (Gartzke, Kaplow, and Mehta 2014).…”