David Hoffman on Rethinking Deterrence

"What are nukes good for?" David Hoffman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and contributing editor to Foreign Policy, unpacks this critical and unanswered question in a recent blog.  Hoffman participated in the Ploughshares Fund-PIR Center conference this June in Moscow and highlights the event his post, "A Bear in the Woods."

Discussion of the next steps for U.S.-Russia security dialogues, Hoffman wrote:

Last week, a group of Russian and American specialists sat down to talk about the future of nuclar arms control, and many of them touched on the need to rethink deterrence. The session was sponsored by the PIR Center , a think-tank on security and nonproliferation issues in Moscow, and the Ploughshares Fund, a foundation supporting efforts to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons.

In a few months, the new strategic nuclear arms treaty between the United States and Russia will probably be ratified. Then what? The agenda for the next arms control talks is long and troublesome: missile defense, tactical nuclear weapons, nukes in reserve, conventional weapons, and more. But the biggest question remains: who is the bear in the woods today, and do nuclear weapons deter them in any way?

Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution, a former Deputy Secretary of State, journalist and author who chronicled the Cold War arms race, urged the group to answer profound questions: "What exactly is deterrence? What is strategic stability?" And Vyacheslav Trubnikov, who headed Russia's foreign intelligence service in the late 1990s and later was first deputy foreign minister and ambassador to India, called for a major effort to discard the old vocabulary and find "terms with new meaning."

Read Hoffman's full post at his blog on ForeignPolicy.com and follow him on twitter @thedeadhandbook.