Publications

During the Cold War, and especially in the 1980s, there were some serious efforts in the academic and policy communities to study how a nuclear war could end.This study will attempt neither to construct particular scenarios of war termination nor to examine important topics such as bargaining strategies or monitoring and verification of nuclear cease fires. The focus here is broader, namely, the political-military contexts for the management of nuclear crises and post-crisis force operations, including escalation control and war termination. Specifically, correcting the potential inability of states to terminate a nuclear war requires that military planners and policymakers first accept the concept of nuclear war termination as feasible and desirable. There are considerable obstacles standing in the way of that acceptance, not the least being the intellectual resistance by many, based on the assumption that deterrence is undermined by a willingness to plan seriously for its possible failure.